An old-fashioned bell jingled as she opened the door and stepped into a long, narrow room furnished with all sorts of smoking paraphernalia and memorabilia. Old cigarette ads, a poster of Humphrey Bogart with his trademark cigarette hanging off his lips, cigarette cases, pipes . . .
“How may I help you?” a voice came from the rear of the store.
Sunny tore her eyes from the wild display to look at the young man behind the counter. He was tall and skinny, wearing a black turtleneck that only accentuated his pale skin. Watery blue eyes peered at her through a pair of wire-framed glasses, and the forelock of his long, dark hair dangled down past his eyebrows. He brushed it back with a practiced gesture, smiling at Sunny. “It’s a little much, I know. My dad started this place, and it’s as much his collection as our sales stock.”
“You sell foreign cigarettes?” Sunny asked.
The skinny young man nodded, dropping his forelock into his eyes again. “We have a wide selection, and if need be, we can order almost any brand for you.”
Sunny dug out the crumpled cigarette butt she’d kept in a small plastic bag. “Do you have any of these?”
The young man’s face lit up with an enthusiast’s excitement. “A
“A whoosy-whatsa?” Sunny asked.
“It’s an old variety of cigarette that pretty much went out of style after World War Two, except in the Soviet Union. They didn’t have filters, and you used the cardboard tube as a sort of cigarette holder, pinching it together here for your fingers . . .”
He held up the butt between his thumb and forefinger and the end of the tube near the tobacco. “And then you pressed it together here for your mouth.” With his other hand, he squeezed the cardboard perpendicular to his first hold, creating a sort of mouthpiece. He let go that end of the tube and, grinning, gestured with the cigarette, his fingers making a sort of “okay” gesture with the palm facing him and the remains of the tobacco facing her. “You can almost see this in an old movie. ‘Ve haff vays of makink you talk.’”
“Do you have the brand?” she asked.
The young man looked at the Cyrillic letters on the side of the tube. “Oh, Belmorkanal. Sure. Named to commemorate a triumph of Soviet engineering—they cut a canal from the Baltic Sea—”
“Does that mean you have it?” Sunny interrupted.
The clerk turned to a floor-to-ceiling pigeonhole arrangement behind the counter, featuring a huge array of cigarette packs, from American brands that Sunny was familiar with to gaudily colored packets with words and even alphabets she didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, we’re out.” The skinny young guy glanced back at Sunny over his shoulder. “Are you sure you want that brand? It’s awfully strong.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for a friend—an acquaintance, actually,” Sunny quickly amended. “We met at a concert, and I never really got his name. But he left that cigarette at my apartment, and I wondered if he might buy them here.”
The young clerk frowned dubiously. “We do have one customer who gets Belmorkanals. I’d say he was an Eastern European gentleman, on the older side, but sort of big and burly—”
“That’s the guy,” Sunny said. Then she let her lips droop in disappointment. “Don’t tell me he came in and cleared you out?”
The young man shook his head, forcing him to sweep his hair back again. “He always calls in advance to make sure he can get a full carton.”
“Then maybe you can do me a favor.” Sunny dug out a business card for MAX and scribbled her cell phone number on the back. Then, trying not to wince, she pulled a twenty from her pocket—a big chunk of her weekly expense money. She slid the card and the bill across the counter to the young man. “When he gives you a call, can you give me a call?”
The clerk stared at Sunny’s offering as if it might bite him. “This really isn’t about cigarettes, is it?”
Sunny tried to look like a girl in love. “I just want to see him again, that’s all.” She gave him a bright smile, “Hey, if it works out, you’ll have a great story for your customers.”
Sighing, the young man took Sunny’s card and the twenty. “I can’t promise when he’ll come,” he warned.
