I gunned the cab, putting my foot almost through the floorboards. I took the next turn on two wheels, invoking
Finally, I saw the big, black car turn into a street and heard the sound of tires squealing to a halt. I pulled up alongside the curb and got out on the run. I stayed alongside a stone wall until I reached the corner and saw the Mercedes backing out. Only one man was inside it now, driving it away.
I let him pull off and then hurried to the entranceway of a typical, ornately decorated Moroccan house. I saw lights flicking on inside and looked around for a way in. It was easy enough. Low-hanging cross-bars formed part of the entranceway roof. I leaped up, caught an arm around one and pulled myself up onto a small rooftop.
A narrow ledge led to a large, arched window and I crawled along it, moving slowly on the precarious edge. The window opened easily at my touch and I crawled into the house, pausing inside to let my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The room was empty but through an open archway I saw lights and I heard voices from the floor below.
I moved on the balls of my feet, noiselessly, and was grateful for the tiled, Moroccan floor. I went through the archway into a corridor and now the voices were louder, angrier. I heard the sound of a slap followed by a short scream and then a long, pain-filled cry.
A flight of steps beckoned and I went down them, moving cautiously. Marina screamed again and I found myself on a narrow balcony that ran around the four sides of a room which looked down onto the room below it.
There, Marina was seated on a straight-backed chair, wearing only black panties and a loose black bra, surrounded by four Russians, one of them the crew-cut, beefy-faced man. Marina’s breasts, upturned, full, magnificent, pushed forward as her hands were bound behind the back of the chair.
One of the Russians had a cattle prod, I saw, and he handed it to the crew-cut one.
“Here, Estan, you take it,” he said.
Marina’s head was forward and the one called Estan pulled her back by the hair roughly.
I saw the glistening shine of tears on her face.
“Where is Karminian?” the one called Estan asked, his accent rough and Russian. The other three carbon copies stood by, drinking in the girl’s magnificence.
I felt my hands open and close, itching to get at their burly, stolid necks.
Marina, in bra and panties before these thugs, was like a precious painting before a herd of swine.
“Where is he?” the Russian shouted again. He pulled the girl’s head back hard and I saw her breasts now fill the loose bra as she arched backward and cried out in pain.
“I don’t know, I tell you,” she gasped.
“Keep lying and we’ll really start on you,” Estan said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” He drew back his arm and slapped her across the face with a tremendous blow.
Marina and the chair toppled over sideways and I heard her broken cry of pain.
“Why were you visiting his friend in the apartment?” the Russian shouted as the others picked up the girl and the chair together and set them upright on the floor again.
“I thought Anton was there,” Marina gasped. “I thought he’d come back. I don’t know the man who was there.”
The Russian hit her again, not as hard this time but on her already bruised and reddened face it landed with even greater pain and the girl screamed again.
“You lie,” the Russian said. “We have been watching the apartment. We saw the newcomer arrive and stay there. We’ll get to him soon enough. It seems he also seeks Karminian and calls himself an artist.”
The information one can pick up at keyholes, figuratively speaking, I said to myself. It was more than a little interesting to find out that the Russians were as anxious to get hold of Karminian as we were.
That meant one thing, anyway. If he were dead, they hadn’t been the ones to put him out of business. And if he were only in hiding, was he hiding from the Russians or someone else? Karminian was taking on more intriguing aspects with every passing moment.
Marina’s scream, ear-splitting and curdled with pain, stopped my musings and I looked down to see the Russian had thrust the cattle prod into her navel. He was getting more sadistic in his efforts to get information which Marina didn’t have to give.
We artists hate to see beauty desecrated, I reminded myself, taking one of the two tubes of paint out of my pants pocket.
The balcony led to a narrow flight of stone steps at the far corner of the four-sided overhanging ledge. I unscrewed the cap of the tube and began to squeeze the paint, cerulean blue, along the balcony floor, next to the low side wall.
