Wolves Eat Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

him, although the jacket given to him by Pasha was folded on the coffee table beside a snifter and two empty bottles of brandy. He said, "I don't have the code to the keypad, so I stayed."
    "Why?" Arkady asked.
    "Just to get things straight."
    "Straighten us out, please."
    Hoffman tilted his head and smiled. "Renko, as far as your investigation goes, I want you to know that you wouldn't have touched Pasha or me in a thousand years. The American Securities and Exchange Commission never hung anything on me."
    "You fled the country."
    "You know what I always tell complainers? 'Read the fine print, asshole!' "
    "The fine print is the important print?"
    "That's why it's fine."
    "As in 'You can be the wealthiest man in the world and live in a palace with a beautiful woman, but one day you will fall out a tenth-floor window'?" Arkady said. "As fine as that?"
    "Yeah." The air went out of Hoffman, and it occurred to Arkady that for all the American's bravado, without the protection of Pasha Ivanov, Bobby Hoffman was a mollusk without its shell, a tender American morsel on the Russian ocean floor.
    "Why don't you just leave Moscow?" Arkady asked Hoffman. "Take a million dollars from the company and go. Set up in Cyprus or Monaco."
    "That's what Timofeyev suggested, except his number was ten million."
    "That's a lot."
    "Look, the bank accounts Pasha and I opened offshore add up to about a hundred million. Not all our money, of course, but that's a lot."
    A hundred million? Arkady tried to add the zeroes. "I stand corrected."
    Victor took a chair and set down his briefcase. He gave the apartment the cold glance of a Bolshevik in the Winter Palace. From his briefcase he fished a personal ashtray fashioned from an empty soda can, although his sweater had holes that suggested he put out his cigarettes another way. He also had put, in a light-fingered way, drinking glasses from the evening before in plastic bags labeled "Zurin," "Timofeyev" and "Rina Shevchenko," just in case.
    Hoffman contemplated the empty bottles. "Staying here is like watching a movie, running every possible scenario. Pasha jumping out the window, being dragged and thrown out, over and over. Renko, you're the expert: was Pasha killed?"
    "I have no idea."
    "Thanks a lot, that's helpful. Last night you sounded like you had suspicions."
    "I thought the scene deserved more investigation."
    "Because as soon as you started to poke around, you found a closet full of fucking salt. What is that about?"
    "I was hoping you could tell me. You never noticed that with Ivanov before, a fixation on salt?"
    "No. All I know is, everything wasn't as simple as the prosecutor and Timofeyev said. You were right about Pasha changing. He locked us out of here. He'd wear clothes once and throw them away. It wasn't like giving the jacket to me. He threw out the clothes in garbage bags. Driving around, suddenly he'd change his route, like he was on the run."
    "Like you," Victor said.
    "Only he didn't run far," Arkady said. "He stayed in Moscow."
    Hoffman said, "How could he go? Pasha always said, 'Business is personal. You show fear and you're dead.' Anyway, you wanted more time to investigate. Okay, I bought you some."
    "How did you do that?"
    "Call me Bobby."
    "How did you do that, Bobby?"
    "NoviRus has foreign partners. I told Timofeyev that unless you were on the case, I'd tell them that the cause of Pasha's death wasn't totally resolved. Foreign partners are nervous about Russian violence. I always tell them it's exaggerated."
    "Of course."
    "Nothing can stop a major project—the Last Judgment wouldn't stop an oil deal—but I can stall for a day or two until the company gets a clean bill of health."
    "The detective and I will be the doctors who decide this billion-dollar state of health? I'm flattered."
    "I'd start you off with a bonus of a thousand dollars."
    "No, thanks."
    "You don't like money? What are you, communists?" Hoffman's smile stalled halfway between insult and