Page 96 of While You Were Spying
Henri leans forward, hands clasped between his knees. “No, but at one point Bernard gave a barely perceptible nod in their direction. Josephine wouldn’t have seen it because she had just looked down at her plate.”
“Did he do anything else to acknowledge them?” Isabelle asks.
“No. Other than that, his focus was fully on Josephine.”
“What happened after you two finished eating lunch?” Isabelle asks her grandmother.
“He paid for the meal and walked me to my car.”
“And then?”
“Are you asking if he kissed me? You know a lady never kisses and tells.” A familiar one-sided smile—the one I’ve seen numerous times on Isabelle—slides onto Josephine’s face.
“No, they didn’t kiss,” Liza says, not living by the same rule when it comes to her friend. “Josephine drove away, and Bernard did the same in the opposite direction.”
“But the three men left the restaurant a minute or two after that,” Henri says. “We were outside watching Josephine leave, which is why we saw the three men. They got into an SUV and turned the same direction Bernard had gone.”
“Can you two describe them?” I ask.
“The older man was bald,” Liza says, “with a white goatee and bushy eyebrows, and he had wire-rimmed glasses. Like that boy who’s a wizard and goes to the school that looks like a castle.”
“You mean Harry Potter?” Isabelle asks.
“That’s the one.”
Henri nods. “The younger man could have been his relative. He had the same eyes and nose. But he was at least thirty or forty years younger, didn’t have a goatee, and still had his hair, which was black.”
“And he had a tattoo on the right side of his neck,” Liza says.
“What did it look like?”
“I could only see part of it. Like the older man, he was wearing a dress shirt, which covered most of the design, but from what I could tell, it was a picture of a pocket watch, and there were some words above it.”
“Do you remember what they said?”
“He was too far away, and the letters were too small for me to make out the words.”
“What color was the tattoo?”
“Black and white?”
A sinking sensation takes root in my stomach.
“Did you see any other tattoos on him?”
“Not that I remember.”
“He had some on his fingers.” Henri lifts his right hand and points to the back of the middle three fingers.
And the sinking sensation drops to the ground like an elevator whose cable has been cut.
Fuck.
I don’t even need to hear the third man’s description. The one that Henri had referred to as beefy.
It’s Rasputin Zadorov. Vadik Orlov’s henchman.
The man with the watch tattoo on his neck is Nikolai Orlov, Vadik’s grandson.
