MORNING SERIAL
“IT’S not that. I just thought you’d have a chef or something? It’s a big old house. I saw some people down by the pool when I arrived. Is that your family?”
Prostakov shook his head and took the empty shot glass from my hand.
“Nobody here but me,” he said. “And Viktor, who you met yesterday.”
I thought of pressing it, asking who the man and girls were at the funeral, and I could see in his eyes he was waiting for that line, but instead I said, “I must have been mistaken. A trick of the light.”
“Tricky light,” he said and sniggered. “I would offer you another drink – I find you good company – but it would spoil the bargain we just entered into.”
“The bargain?”
“That you would think about my offer,” he said.
He had me driven back to Protaras by his man, Viktor, who kept an uncomfortable silence from the driver seat, and offered up very little welcome when I asked him about the people I had seen by the pool. He too said I must have been mistaken.
Four
It was not such an easy thing to just say yes to Illie Prostakov. The money would have changed everything with Clare, blown debtors off my back. Part of me wanted to tell her, wanted to call her up immediately and say that everything was going to be okay, just for the price of a little intrigue and sacrifice. What sacrifice? she might well have said. And thinking of the tower and the idyllic life I may have been stepping into, I would have found it difficult to argue her down from that point. But it was the best of both worlds for us, wasn’t it? I had stepped up, cleared the mess, and had also given her space I knew she needed. Paying up and staying away was the optimum scenario; coming home empty handed would have been the nadir.
The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks. com
CONTINUES TOMORROW