Page 46 of Dangerous Passion

The Petrovs had been aristocracy in St. Petersburg, the family fortune and nearly all the family members wiped out by Stalin.

But books and photographs had somehow survived themonsters, ah yes, and had come down to the last Petrov. Andrei had an entrée into the lives of his forebears. Though he read the books and pored over the photographs in a small room with plyboard walls which hide nothing of what his drunken neighbors said or did, though he lived in a small, cramped 4thfloor walkup in Brooklyn, that wasn’t his life. His life was in another place and another time. In his imagination, Andrei was Prince Petrov, a grandee in 19thcentury St. Petersburg.

He lived in a palatial Italianate mansion along Nevsky Prospekt, which had been his great great grandfather’s town house. As a young boy, before his parents emigrated, he used to stand in the street, small hands clutching the bars of the elaborate wrought iron fence guarding the building, and imagine that the building now housing the State Archives was still his. The mansion of Prince Petrov.

He’d pored over the books and knew every detail of his great great grandfather’s life. The number of servants, the coaches and the horses, each horse with its own groom. The social calendar filled with balls and concerts and parties. The elaborate meals with fifty guests eating off the one-thousand piece gold-trimmed set of Limoges china.

And the food! He’d come across a set of menus for meals during the Christmas season of 1904 and his boy’s mind swam with the grandeur of it all. Borscht and kvass, kholodets, pelmeny, twenty different types of pirozhki, kebabs from woodland game hunted on Petrov land, sudak fished from the well-stocked ponds of the country dascha. Fruits and berries collected by the serfs, an enormous Sharlotka carried in on a two foot long silver serving tray borne by four servants. Washed down by the finest imported French champagne. Fifty guests, one hundredservants.

Andrei’s young heart thrilled at the images. Russia’s finest, at the Petrov table by candlelight, a quartet playing Mozart on the balcony overlooking the immense mirrored dining hall, an army of servants in livery, quietly serving theton.

His parents applied to emigrate to Amerika when he was eleven and he thought—yes, perhaps Amerika would be the place where he would make his money and return in triumph back to Russia where the Petrovs would take their rightful place amongst the rich and mighty.

It didn’t turn out that way. Andrei’s father, an engineer, could only find work as a cab driver, working 14 hours a day for a company that paid him a pittance. Andrei’s mother developed breast cancer and the two Petrov men watched helplessly as she died a fast, painful death.

When they buried her, his father died too, except his body. He could barely work with his grief. So it was all on him, on Andrei, now Andrew. His shoulders had to bear the burden of the Petrovs.

He’d had such huge dreams of returning to the Motherland, dreams with the solid feel of destiny to them. A Petrov picking up after seventy years of the barbarity of the Soviets. Yet with each passing year, as he grew taller, the plans grew smaller, shrinking steadily until he was reduced to applying for aid to enroll in a second-rate cooking school.

It might have been his way out. A quick rise through the ranks, a few years at the top. Celebrity chefs could pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and millions in sponsorships. But not him.

He’d been interviewing for the lowly job ofgarde manger,the fuckingpantry supervisor, in a third rate restaurant in Rockaway, when he’d heard of a jobgoing for Russian speakers. In Manhattan, the heart of fine cuisine. And it paid three times the going salary.

It was a good job, in a superbly well-equipped kitchen, but his talents went unnoticed. Well, what could he expect? He was cooking for Russianthugs.Men who knew the best gun to use in a firefight, but who had no clue how to judge the fineness of crepes or the smooth consistency of a good béchamel. Or even appreciate the fine porcelain they ate on or the heavy crystal of the glasses they drank out of.

Andrei wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, except that they spoke the language he worshipped. The language of his forefathers. The language of Pushkin and Tolstoy and Yevteshenko.

Only this wasn’t the Russian he’d been taught by his parents. The language the thugs spoke was rough, ungrammatical, provincial, the Russian of illiterate goons. Gutter Russian, fit only for guttersnipes.

Yet the money was so good, he was forced to stay, even though every day was an assault on his senses, another day amongst the barbarians. He considered it a form of indentured servitude, the exorbitant salary he could never hope to duplicate elsewhere like a noose around his neck, slowly choking him.

He studied his surroundings, seeking a way out. He was a Prince amongst swine. It went without saying that he could outwit them all.

The kitchen fed 45 men twice daily, like a small restaurant. It was also open 24/7 whenever necessary, as men came and went at all hours of the day and the night. The food was copious, fresh and good, without any attempt at sophistication. After a week in the kitchen, Andrei realized that any decent housewife could do what he did. Only it hadto be in Russian, since almost the entire staff was Russian or Ukrainian.

He worked for a mystery man everyone called Drake. Andrei knew very little about him and no one talked, ever. The closest Andrei could come to information on Drake was a friendship with the butler, a Russian-Ukrainian called Shota. Shota was fanatically faithful to Drake, though Andrei couldn’t understand why. The mystery man kept to himself on the top story of the building, rarely interacting with the staff except through intercom messages.

It wasn’t until Andrei had spent a couple of months working for Drake that he understood that he was working for an international criminal, one of the most powerful men in the world. A frisson had run up his spine. Surely there would be a way to use this information? An enemy to sell information to?

It wasn’t easy because this Drake was mysterious as hell. It was an impregnable fortress up above, the domain of a powerful, untouchable ruler. Very few people knew Drake’s comings and goings. The man was like smoke—impossible to grasp, impossible to pin down.

And then Andrei had two strokes of good luck. Fabulous luck, actually. Shota developed a crush on him and a Russian came to Drake as a friend and left as an enemy.

Shota was easy to lead on. He was a romantic, and was deliriously happy with soulful looks and stolen kisses in the pantry. Andrei had no interest whatsoever in fucking Shota, but he did want to string him along as much as possible. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake disappeared two Tuesday afternoons a month. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake was buying the entire production of an artist called Grace Larsen. Finding the gallery that sold GraceLarsen had been a snap. He waited in a coffee shop across the street on the right Tuesday afternoons and voila! The mysterious Drake, slinking in an alley.

Hard info on a billionaire running a crime empire was worth money, big money, but you had to find a buyer for it. Then he overheard that a Russian was offering $250,000 for information on Drake. None of Drake’s men were willing to cross their dangerous boss for a year’s salary. But then none of Drake’s men had any ambitions other than to be thugs for hire.

Andrei did.

There was a Proton mail account. It had all been so easy.If you want information on Drake, transfer $250,000 to this bank account.

The response, and the $250,000 payment, had come fast. Someone wanted the information, badly. Andrei had sent the information and the money went into his savings account.

For a sweaty couple of hours after the attempt on Drake’s life, Andrei expected a tap on the shoulder and—well, fuck, Drake was a mobster, after all—two bullets through the back of the head, Soviet style. But as the hours ticked by, Andrei’s hands steadied and the sweat along his spine dried. His exquisitely sensitive antenna told him that no one suspected him. He was a sous-chef, a kitchen servant, off everyone’s radar.

The cell in his chef’s pants vibrated. Andrei took a bathroom break and checked the screen.

$100,000 for further information.

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