“Watch the fuck where you’re going, gramps,” he said.
We both knew he was in the wrong. We both knew he was trying to impress the young lady he was dancing with. We both knew that the situation would quickly escalate were I to let it.
“My mistake,” I said with a smile and kept walking.
I couldn’t decide if it was the Buddha’s influence or me mellowing with age. Either way, I had to admit, it felt kind of good, not forcing the issue.
I reached the stairway the bouncer directed me to. I looked back for Savannah but couldn’t see her through the crowd. I climbed the stairs and walked down a short hallway to a door marked, “Private.” I knocked.
“You are the one who is friend of Laz?” The voice on the other side of the door was Russian, female, older.
“We used to work together,” I said, “for the same company.”
“You have photo ID?”
I got out my driver’s license and slid it under the door. A few seconds went by, then the door bolt turned, followed by a second lock. A hand slid the security chain from its track. The door opened a crack, revealing a thick, low-slung, middle-aged woman in a pink velour warm-up suit. Her hair was the color of carrot juice. She was puffing on a Virginia Slim.
“I am Anya,” she said, handing me back my license, “sister of Laz.”
“Cordell Logan. I’m a friend of Laz. I’m looking for Gennady Bondarenko. Is he around?”
“Gennady is my husband.” She glanced furtively behind me to make sure no one else was coming up the stairs, then gestured. “You will please to come in.”
Anya Bondarenko locked the door behind me and slid the safety chain back in place. Inside the office was an executive desk made of burl wood with a matching filing cabinet, a freestanding bank safe, and a foldout couch. A sixty-one-inch plasma television hung from the far wall. A big, square-jawed twenty-year-old in camouflage fatigue pants and a sky-blue UCLA T-shirt lounged on the couch, nursing a Heineken and watching Jerry Springer. He had close-cropped hair the color of night and three days’ worth of facial stubble black enough to be blue.
“This is Marko. My nephew. He is here to visit from Omsk.”
The kid didn’t respond, transfixed as he was by the TV.
“His English is no good,” Anya said, eyeing me through a tobacco haze. “You look familiar to me.”
“I used to come in once in awhile. Years ago.”
“Would you care for cocktail?”
“Alas, those days are behind me.”
“Too bad for you.” She inhaled what was left of her cigarette, blew the smoke out her nose, and dropped the butt into a Diet Pepsi can, which hissed, then poured three fingers of Absolut into a crystal tumbler.
“So,” she said, “I call Laz, but he has heard nothing.”
“Nothing about what?”
She looked at me like I was a slow learner. “Laz. I call him. ‘Have you heard from Gennady?’ He tells me no. He says, ‘I will make calls.’ This is yesterday. Now, you come. So, you tell me, where is my husband?”
I explained that her brother Laz and I hadn’t spoken in a few years. My visit and Gennady’s apparent disappearance, I said, were mere coincidence.
Anya Bondarenko slumped into the chair behind the desk and looked down at her glass mournfully. “I thought my brother sends you. Now I am thinking my husband has left me for another woman.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“I have not seen Gennady for five days.” She lit another Virginia Slim, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. “You have business with him?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You work for government?”
“Used to.”
She shrugged. “What is it you do now, your job?”
I gave her my business card.
She squinted at it through the smoke. “Cordell Logan, CFI. What is this, CFI? You are on TV?”
“Not CSI,” I said, correcting her. “CFI. It means I’m a certified flight instructor.”
“You are pilot?”
“According to the FAA.”
“What is FAA?”
“The sorriest excuse for a bureaucracy on this or any other planet. Listen, Mrs. Bondarenko, if you see your husband, tell him I need to speak with him. It’s important.”
“If I see him,” said, “the first thing I will do is give him the back of my hand for scaring me this way. Then I will tell him.”
“Spasiba.”
“Puzhalsta.”
She walked me to the door.
“Dasvidaniya, Marko.”
Anya Bondarenko’s nephew fired a chilly glance over his shoulder at me, conveying his displeasure at my interrupting his TV-watching. I understood his annoyance. That Jerry Springer is quality entertainment.
Savannah was sipping an apple martini at the bar. The same gym rat who’d backed into me on the dance floor was putting the moves on her. She was doing her best to ignore him, but he would not be ignored.
“One drink. It’s not like I’m asking you to blow me or something.” He was leaning into her, shirt unbuttoned, giving his pheromone musk a chance to work its seductive magic.
“Having fun?” I said as I walked over to her.
“Thank God,” Savannah yelled at me over the music. “Where’ve you been?”
“Playing Kojak.”
The trip was a bust, I told her. The man I’d come to see wasn’t in.
“So what do you want to do?” she said.
“Go back to your place and regroup.”
“She’s with you?” the gym rat said, like he couldn’t believe it.
“For the moment, anyway,” I said.
Savannah shot me a disdainful look as I followed her out.
The gym rat grabbed my arm. “The chick’s into me, man. I can feel it. If she’s really not with you, why don’t you just be cool and step off.” His cologne smelled like something a wolverine might excrete in the middle of mating season.
“Trust me, my friend,” I said, “on your best day, you couldn’t handle it.” I tried to go around him, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Dude, nobody walks away from me. We’re talking here.” He was suddenly in my face, shaking out his arms, like we were about to go three rounds. His glowering eyes and cold, Mike Tyson-like smile were meant to convey the potential for unbridled mayhem. I noticed he was wearing braces on his teeth. Difficult to sell the stone cold-killer persona when your mouth looks like Radio Shack.
“Nice grillwork,” I said, unable to hold back. “What kind of reception do you get with those bad boys?”
“You come in here and make jokes about me? Dude, you got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. Have a nice day.”
I tried to go around him once more. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward him, looping a sloppy roundhouse punch that I slipped easily. I rotated left and fired a shovel hook to his left ear that sent him crashing back into the bar, knocking another guy and his date off their stools like they were bowling pins. The pulsing techno music suddenly stopped. The gym rat was out cold on the floor.
The bouncer came sprinting over. “Everybody cool it!”
Savannah was incensed. “We’re here twenty minutes and you get in a fist fight?”
“The term ‘fight’ conveys fighting. This was more self-defense.”
She didn’t buy it. Neither did the two people I’d knocked from their barstools.
The guy wore glasses and a rayon aloha shirt with little woody wagons on it. A CPA’s version of Sunset Boulevard chic.
“What is your fucking problem, buddy?” he wailed at me, struggling to help his woman off the floor.
His date was a powerfully built woman with stringy brown hair who outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. In her right hand was a nine-millimeter pistol, which she pointed in my face. In her left hand was a six-pointed gold star that said, “Deputy Sheriff, Los Angeles County.”
“Turn around,” she said, her lower lip bleeding, “and put your filthy hands on your head.”
Compared to military MREs, dining at the West Hollywood jail is haute cuisine. My fellow inmates and I enjoyed well-seasoned, perfectly breaded fish sticks for supper and scrambled eggs for breakfast with Tater Tots cooked just right. Even my amiable cell mates, the outlaw bikers Bad Dawg and his brother, Mad Dawg, both agreed that when it came to in-custody meals, West Hollywood rated four stars.