The October List

course.’
    Karpankov didn’t need to mention the latter. He always paid for her expenses when she did a job for him. A murder or anything else.
    Gabriela’s green eyes focused on his, which were, curiously, two shades of gray.
    The mob boss continued with a raw anger in his voice, ‘I wish I could kill him myself. Oh, I do wish that. But …’
    Gabriela knew Karpankov had not killed anyone in a long time. Still, the lean-faced man with the two-tone eyes, and matching gray stubble on his scalp, looked fully capable of murder at the moment.
    She felt warm breath on her hand. She looked down; Karpankov’s huge dog, Gunther, had ambled from his bed in the corner to lick her palm. She scratched the spiky gray and black fur between his ears. Gabriela knew animals; she’d hunted with bird dogs from when she was a teenager. She and the Russian’s dog had bonded when he was a puppy. He was huge now. A month ago Gunther had killed a hired assassin who’d lunged at Karpankov on a walk in Brooklyn. Lightning-fast, the dog had snatched the assailant by the throat and shaken the life from the screaming attacker. Murdering the man who’d hired him – a Jamaican drug lord – had been Gabriela’s most recent job for Karpankov.
    The dog licked her fingers again, nuzzled and returned to his bed.
    ‘What’s his name, the man you want dead?’
    ‘Daniel Reardon.’
    ‘I don’t know him.’
    Now it was Gabriela who looked at the Hudson River through the window, which was free of curtains. The putty in the frame was curling and needed replacing. She felt an urge to strip out the old wads and replace them and paint. She did a lot of the repair work herself, in her apartment in the city and at her hunting lodge upstate, in the Adirondacks, where she frequently hunted – both with her Nikon camera and with her Winchester .270.
    Karpankov now touched his cheek, then the fingers settled on the chin. Rubbed it as if searching for stray bristles he’d neglected to smooth off that morning, though the skin seemed perfectly planed to Gabriela. He muttered words in Russian. ‘ Hui blyad cyka .’
    Gabriela was adept at languages. Since she worked frequently in Brooklyngrad and the other Eastern European immigrant areas of New York, she’d learned Russian. She understood ‘cocksucker.’
    She asked, ‘What’s Reardon’s story?’
    ‘You know Carole?’
    ‘Carole? The daughter of your assistant, Henry?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Pretty girl. Teenager?’
    ‘Twenty.’
    ‘Henry’s been with you a long time.’ Gabriela had noted, upon arriving, that Henry had not been at his desk in the anteoffice and he was not here at the moment. Usually he was a constant shadow.
    ‘Eighteen years. He’s like a brother to me.’
    Karpankov’s tone – more than his earlier words – explained that this would be a hard story to tell.
    He turned and poured some Stolichnaya into a glass. He offered it to her. She shook her head. He tossed down the whole glass then began the story. ‘Reardon picked Carole up in a bar. Took her back to an apartment his company keeps for clients. The Norwalk Fund. Somewhere on the East Side, in the Fifties. He seduced her, though it was really rape. He drugged her. He took pictures of her. Disgusting pictures. He tied her down on an iron coffee table. He used these tight knots he knows because he sails boats. It was like a game with him. She couldn’t move. Then he beat her with a riding crop.’ His voice choked. ‘The pain was terrible … the pain.’
    After another shot of vodka and a dozen slow breaths: ‘Then he and another man, they took turns … well, you understand. That was filmed too. Her face was visible, not theirs. Reardon threatened to put the videos out on the Internet. My God, Carole was in college, she taught at Sunday school! That would destroy her life.’
    Gabriela took this information in with a faint nod. Her heart-shaped face revealed no reaction. To her these were just facts. Though she knew and liked Henry, she felt no personal interest in the matter whatsoever.
    The ease of making this separation was part of her gift.
    If gift it was.
    Karpankov continued, ‘Reardon used the pictures to force Henry to divulge information about my operation. Computer files, passwords. Reardon and his associates broke into our system and stole nearly four hundred thousand dollars before we shut down the servers. Henry tried to kill himself. He took pills. I went to the hospital and he