For the Sake of the Game Read online

  I pushed the dog back into the flat and got the door closed behind us. “Robbie?” I called out but my voice echoed through the bare rooms. No surprise. Robbie was my twin; I could feel his absence like a tangible thing.

  I pushed aside thoughts of Where’s Robbie? and made a grab for the dog’s tag. “So who are you?” I asked him.

  His collar looked just like the one Touie, the cat, wore: scarlet leather, the perimeter dotted with faux gems. One of Robbie’s extravagances. Strange.

  “Sit still, Dog. Let me read this.” But when he did and I had, strange turned to bizarre.

  The tag said, “Touie” and the number on the tag was Robbie’s cell phone.

  My first thought was “WTF?” followed by “Where’s Touie?” I wasn’t her biggest fan, and she was definitely not mine, but I’d just spent five days relocating that cat from New York to London, a feat, on the misery meter, right up there with digging graves in winter. It just wasn’t possible that she’d disappeared. I went through the flat, checking under the comforter where I’d last seen her, inside closets, and even the microwave, which Touie was too fat to fit into. There were limited hiding places. The only things Robbie had brought in, before disappearing, were five boxes of books and a bed, its toxic “new mattress” smell wafting through the flat like bad air freshener.

  The real Touie, like Robbie, was gone.

  “Now what?” I asked, and the dog responded by sniffing around in a distinctive manner, suggesting a bladder situation. I unclipped the shoulder strap from my pink carryon bag, fashioning a leash, and let the dog lead me outside. He had strong opinions about our route, one block to Baker Street and then a left, and another left, until I lost track of where we were.

  The October day was murky with fog. And cold. I was wearing Robbie’s red rain slicker, but it wasn’t enough. How’d I get roped into doing this favor-turned-into-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a–Twilight Zone episode? Robbie had a lifetime of practice getting me to do stuff he didn’t like doing—pet immigration in this case—but I’d had the same lifetime of practice saying no. Yet here I was, and minus the pet in question. How had it happened? What had happened? And why? And where was my damned brother? Seriously, what was I supposed to do? Call 911? Was the number even 911 in England? And then what? I wasn’t one to chalk things up to supernatural forces, but it was a stretch to assume a criminal act. What self-respecting thief would want a plump, elderly cat? And why leave in her place this wheezing dog, straining at his makeshift leash, pulling me through London?

  I’d been wrong about the dog’s bladder: he was on a mission, and hardly paused to sniff, let alone pee. Oblivious to other pedestrians, he pushed onward like a horse heading for the barn at the end of a long day. Perhaps he lived around here? The thought gave me a glimmer of hope.

  Oops. The dog came to a sudden squat and was now doing the unmentionable alongside an iron gate guarding a storefront. As I hadn’t thought to bring along a plastic bag, I looked around guiltily, but no concerned citizens materialized to scold me. The storefront bore an ornate sign: THE RENOWNED MIRKO: PSYCHIC AND CARD READER. This was followed by a phone number, and then, in smaller font, WALK-INS—BOTH SORTS!—WELCOME. I was pondering that when I heard the tinkling of bells, and looked up to see a man standing in the shop doorway.

  We stared at each other. He frowned at me, his lips set in a horizontal line. He was tall and thin, the kind of thin that makes you think, for just a second, stage four cancer, but there was a kinetic energy about him, something in his gray eyes that nixed that impression. A high forehead, made higher by a receding hairline, made him look aristocratic, and strangely attractive, as did a three-piece suit more suited to a wedding than a psychic reading. I felt very American, and not in a good way.

  “Unbelievable,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr.—” I glanced again at the sign. “Mirko. I didn’t bring a plastic bag—satchel—whatever you call them here—okay, never mind. If you have a paper towel or something, I’ll happily clean this up for you.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, ‘happily’ might be overstating it,” I admitted. “But I’m willing to—hey! Dog! Stop.” The dog was greeting the Renowned Mirko like a long-lost lover and attempting to mate with his dress pants. I tugged on the leash.

  “Go. Just go. Take yourself off,” Mirko snapped, and then said, to the dog. “Not now.”

  “Whoa. Hold up,” I said. “Do you know this dog?”

  “No.”

  “You do. You know this dog. This dog knows you.”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  “It’s not nonsense. He dragged me right to you.”

  “Leave.”

  “I’m not leaving,” I said. “I’m walking in. A walk-in. Like the sign says. Both sorts!”

  He gave me a curious look, but then glanced past me and said, “Bloody hell. Too late. Go in.”

  “What?” I look over my shoulder.

  “In, in, go inside, are you deaf? Quickly.” The man took my arm and yanked me—he and the dog—through the open door.

  The shop was warm, and musty with the odor of antiques and incense, the signature scents of psychics the world over. The decor was Victorian clutter. I got a fast impression of chintz, wallpaper and books, books, books, as Mirko herded me across the room to a kitchenette.

  “Sit,” Mirko said, and I thought he was talking to the dog, until he pushed me into an armchair and scooped the dog into my lap. He then hauled over a rococo screen and arranged it in front of me, blocking my view of the room. He leaned in so close I could smell the damp wool of his suit. “Do not make a sound,” he said. “Do not let the dog make a sound. This is critically important.”

  Before I could argue the point, the tinkling bell sounded again, signaling someone entering the shop. “If you value your brother’s life, stay quiet,” Mirko said, and walked away.

  That shut me up.

  The dog and I listened as Mirko said hello to someone. Actually, he said zdravstvujtye. A man responded in kind. In Russian. I knew a few words of Russian, but after the pleasantries, the newcomer told Mirko to wait. A second later came the sound of Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a ballad Robbie once said made him want to cut off his ears. The music source was a cell phone, was my guess, and I wondered why we were listening to it, until I realized it masked conversation. I could pick out only random words now, during the song’s lugubrious pauses, of which there were many. Then came the sound of a zipper zipping. The urge to peek around the screen was strong, but the dog began to struggle, wanting out of my arms and onto a small, narrow refrigerator next to us, on top of which sat a large frozen turkey, thawing, and a large ceramic Blessed Virgin Mary. As I thwarted his efforts to investigate the bird, the twinkling bell sounded again, and Streisand, Diamond, and Russian left the building.

  “You may come out,” Mirko said.

  I came around the screen to find Mirko taking off his jacket and kicking off his shoes. Alongside him was a wheelie suitcase, fully zipped.

  “So how do you know my brother?” I asked, and promptly took off my own jacket, the room being hellishly hot.

  “I haven’t time for this,” he said.

  “But you know where he is?”

  “I do not.” Now he had his vest off and was unbuttoning his dress shirt, as adroit as a stage actor doing a quick change. “I suggest you return to your flat, with the dog-who-is-not-your-dog, and sleep off the jet lag that you’re trying to ignore. It’s four in the morning Los Angeles time, and that red-eye you took did you no favors even with an exit row and a window seat. Nor does sleeping on floors agree with you.”

  My eyes must’ve widened. He smiled, before whipping off his shirt and giving me a view of his naked chest. Not a bad chest, if you don’t mind skinny, which I don’t, but I wasn’t about to be distracted. “I don’t know how you know the things you know,” I said, “but all I care about is Robbie.” The dog, perhaps reacting to my tone of voice, pro
duced a sound that was less a bark and more the yowl of a human infant. “You tell him, Churchill,” I said.

  “Churchill? I’d have said Gladstone.” Mirko walked to a bureau covered with Tarot cards, opened a drawer and took out a some clothes and a pair of Converse high tops.

  “Whoever that is.”

  “Victoria’s Prime Minister, who more closely resembles a French bulldog.” He pulled a T-shirt over his head, followed by a hoodie, a purple Grateful Dead relic from some bygone decade.

  I stooped to let Gladstone wiggle out of my arms and over to Mirko, who was pulling on his sneakers, though not bothering to lace them up. “Fine,” I said. “But you’re pretty much the only person I know in London, not counting Pet Immigration, and I’m not leaving until—”

  “Suit yourself.” He stood up, ruffled his hair and put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses. The transformation from aristocrat to geek was not just fast, it was total. From his pants pocket he withdrew a remote, which he aimed at the wall behind me.

  A creaking sound like the opening of Dracula’s coffin made me turn and see a wall-sized bookcase move.

  Slowly, squeakily, so disorientingly I thought, earthquake? the bookcase kept advancing into the room, as freaky as the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I fixed my eyes at random on one frayed book called The Coming of the Fairies, willing it to stay put, but nope. It moved. When I turned my attention back to Mirko, he stepped over his pile of clothes, grabbed the handle of the wheelie suitcase and moved to a now-palpable gap between bookcase and wall.

  Behind the gap was a door. Mirko opened the door and went through it.

  I grabbed the dog and followed.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he called out.

  “Following you!” I called back. “What’s it look like?”

  It couldn’t have looked like anything, because it was pitch black except for the glow of Mirko’s cell, bouncing along ahead of me. What it smelled like was a dank cellar, the scent intensifying as I followed Mirko down wooden stairs. When we reached the bottom, a light popped on.

  We were in a long and narrow passageway, low-ceilinged, brick-floored and lined with storage shelves. The kind of place that makes you think, bomb shelter except that it was stuffed with . . . stuff. Furniture, art, armaments, and god knows what else, bubble-wrapped, crated up or just scattered about. Mirko pushed aside a Roman helmet and heaved his wheelie suitcase onto a high shelf, showing an impressive set of muscles. He gave me a quick look, then took off down the passageway.

  “Keep up,” he called over his shoulder. “Unless you fancy being locked in.”

  I jogged after him, clutching the dog, until some three hundred feet later the tunnel ended in a second staircase. The lights went off behind me and in darkness I followed Mirko up the stairs, bumping into him at the top. “’S’cuse me,” I mumbled, unsettled by his proximity, and his aftershave. Bay rum. Which I liked.

  “This is where we go our separate ways,” he said, working to unlock yet another door. A moment later we were out of the tunnel and in the back room of a supermarket.

  It was a Tesco Metro, a British 7-Eleven. I followed Mirko through swinging doors onto the selling floor and the mundane world of Whiskas catfood and Wotsits Cheese Snacks.

  Mirko marched through the Tesco with all the confidence of a store manager. I tried to match his gait and attitude, never mind that I was carrying an unattractive dog the size of a watermelon.

  Once outside, he picked up the pace, his long legs at full stride, weaving his way through lunch-hour London, jammed with people. I caught up with him on the center island of some major intersection, waiting for the pedestrian signal. Before the light could turn green, Mirko stepped into the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding Volvo, and took off at a run. I said a prayer—a necessity, since the traffic was of course going the wrong way—and took off too, wincing at the horns honking at me. I followed him onto an escalator and down into London’s Underground.

  It was luck that I had a metro card—no, Oyster card, as they whimsically called it. I raced after him, dog squirming in my arms, through the turnstiles, over to some tube line or other, onto a platform, into a subway car, and out again at Liverpool Street, where we made our way to the train station. He made a beeline for a self-serve ticket machine and I found one too, as close as I could get to his. We bought tickets, me juggling credit card, dog, and purse. He then race-walked to a platform, and I hurried after, boarding a train labeled “Norwich.” I walked the length of several cars, ignoring the stares of the presumably dog-averse until I found Mirko, at a table for four. As I approached, the train gave a lurch and I lost my balance for a moment, grabbing Mirko’s shoulder to steady myself and ending up with a handful of shirt, at which point Gladstone scrambled out of my arms and into his lap.

  Mirko accepted the dog, but raised an eyebrow at me. “Took your time, didn’t you?”

  I plopped into the seat across from him, still panting. “Okay, where’s Robbie? Also, who do you work for and what do you do, and also, what do I call you, because you’re obviously not Mirko and while we’re at it, how do you know all those things about me, things not even Robbie knew? And don’t say you’re psychic, because you’re as clairvoyant as a bagel.”

  He held my look. “One, that’s what I intend to learn, but lower your voice, please, because I’m following someone and while he is three cars ahead of us, I imagine the entire train can hear you. Two, a small agency within the British government. Three, call me Kingsley. Four, observation. You’re an American because of your accent. Someplace hot, because it’s winter, yet you have a tan line near your clavicle from a sports bra, and another at your ankle, from your trainers, so not a vacation tan, but a resident’s. Your diction has no tinge of the American south, so not Florida, and the freckles on your left forearm suggest an inordinate amount of time spent on motorways with your arm resting on the window side, more likely in the ungodly traffic of California, than in Hawaii, and from the shade of your hair, Los Angeles. The lead on the dog is fashioned from a luggage strap and still bears the knot of elastic from an airline identification tag.” He picked up the slack leash and proceeded to unknot the elastic. “Your neck is stiff,” he continued, “suggesting someone who slept with her head against the window on the left side of an airplane. Front row, coach, standby, so last to board. With no seat in front of you to stow your bag, and by the time you boarded, there was no overhead space left, so the flight attendant checked your carry-on, which explains the tag.” He set the leash down and Gladstone looked up at him. “You dozed—fitfully—on a floor last night, as evidenced by the bits of shag carpet in your hair.”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?” I asked.

  “It does impress you,” he said. “Your turn. How did you know which ticket to buy? You couldn’t possibly see my touch screen.”

  “No,” I said. “But I had a clear view of your forearm. I calculated the length of that, plus your fingers, factored in the fifty-five-degree angle your elbow was bent at, which told me where your fingers would land on the touch-screen keyboard, given the destination list from the drop-down menu.”

  That shut him up.

  The train conductor approached. “Tickets, please,” he said.

  In unison, Kingsley pulled his out of his hoodie pocket and I pulled mine out of my jeans. We handed them over.

  The conductor punched a hole in mine but frowned at Kingsley’s. “Stansted Mountfitchet Station? You’re on the wrong train, sir.”

  Kingsley blinked.

  I gave the conductor my most charming smile. “I’m so sorry. My cousin is legally blind, but refuses to ask for help. May I pay the difference for him?”

  With a shake of the head, the conductor accepted the twenty-pound note I offered him, made change, and issued Kingsley a new ticket. “An assistance dog, is it?” he asked, directing the question at me.

  “Gladstone? Yes,” I said. “Years of training.”

  Once the conductor was out
of earshot, Mirko said, “You nicked my ticket. Nicely done.”

  “I traded tickets,” I corrected him. “Which is harder. Robbie and I played ‘pickpocket’ as children.”

  “Not so good, though, at buying the proper ticket. You disappoint me.”

  “Same. Where’d I go wrong?”

  “You assumed I used my index finger on the touchscreen. I type with my thumb. A three-inch difference. Classic schoolgirl error,” he said, but I could tell he was warming up to me. “When did you last talk to Robbie?”

  “Five days ago,” I said. “He texted me, asking if would I please fly to New York, pick up his cat, Touie, and get her to London because his sub-tenant was threatening to drown her and he was stuck in England on a job. So I did. It was hell. Whatever lies ahead, let me tell you I survived Live Animal Border Inspection at Heathrow, which can make grown men cry, so your Russian mafia doesn’t scare me.”

  His long fingers, on Gladstone’s tall ears, stopped mid-pet. “Russian mafia?”

  “The Streisand fan. At the shop. Some low-level operative, right? A smurf?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “You’re obviously laundering money, you’ve got a tunnel filled with black market goods, a wheelie suitcase full of rubles—”

  “What makes you think rubles?”

  “Your Russian friend, during a sappy pause in ‘You Don’t Send Me Flowers,’ said ‘eight hundred million.’ If that was pounds or dollars, you’d need a U-Haul to transport them. Rubles, on the other hand, come in denominations of five thousand, and yeah, you could stuff fifteen thousand of them into a suitcase. Which is around a million pounds, a million three in dollars.” I wondered if, behind those gray eyes, he was checking my math. “Anyhow,” I said. “My brother was part of this adventure. Whatever it is, it’s got ‘Robbie’ written all over it, him being a Russian interpreter, as you of course know.”