He nods. ‘Right. What time will you be home?’
My stomach flutters. We sound like a real couple. ‘I guess around midnight.’
‘Midnight? All right, I’ll be waiting for you.’
The thought comes unbidden. I’m so in love with you, Zane. I hurriedly drop my gaze so he does not see anything he shouldn’t in my eyes. I let my fingers trace the crevice of the scar on his face. ‘How did you get this?’
‘He had a knife and I did not,’ he says simply.
‘What happened then?’ I prompt.
‘I got a scar and he lost his life.’ His voice and face are devoid of any emotion.
Oh God! How can I possibly live in his world? Yet I cannot walk away. Not yet.
‘Do these stars mean anything?’ I ask softly, tracing the blue star tattoos on the front of his shoulders with my fingers.
For a few seconds I think he is not going to answer then he gives a slight shrug. ‘Since you ask I will tell you. They denote the highest distinction that can be reached in Vor v Zokone’
‘What is that?’ I am very curious about his past, but I keep my tone light. This is the first time he has ever offered any information about his past and I don’t want to scare him off by being too insistent or intense.
‘A rough translation would be Thieves in Law.’
I look at him levelly. ‘Thieves in Law?’
‘Vor v Zokone is the elite of Russian organized crime and operates under a very strict code of ethics. Breaking the code is punishable by death. When I got these stars they meant something. Nowadays, a lot of young men have them without belonging to the organization.’
‘Why do you have the same design on your knees?’
‘The stars are worn to declaring an intention never, no matter what the circumstances, to kneel or co-operate with what we call musor or pigs. but you probably know them as the police or government officials.’
‘So you are a member of this elite organization?’ I ask cautiously.
‘I did. A long time ago.’
I stare into his eyes, so luxuriously fringed by thick, wet lashes. ‘You are no longer part of it?’
‘When the Soviet Union collapsed the character of the Russian mob changed. The stupid ones quickly ended up behind bars, the highly connected ones bought up state resources for a song and became billionaires, others looked for new homes far from the motherland to run their often ingenious smuggling operations.’
‘Ingenious?’
He shrugs, the movement careless, elegant and foreign. ‘They were clever scams.’
‘Yeah. Like what?’
‘Like dyeing wood grain alcohol blue, labeling it windshield washer liquid, shipping tanker loads of it back to Russia, un-dyeing it, and selling the stuff as vodka. The goal was to avoid paying alcohol taxes.’
‘I see.’ I say softly. ‘So you were one of those who came to England?’
‘Uh …. hmm.’
‘Did you run the alcohol scam too?’
‘Nope.’
‘Drug dealing?’
‘I used to. I still have good contacts and I can arrange a major deal.’
‘Drugs kill people,’ I whisper.
He looks at me completely unrepentant or ashamed. ‘Drugs are not produced in Russia. I was just the middle-man. Find out who guards the opium fields in Afghanistan and South America then come and lecture me.’
I bite my lower lip. ‘So what did you do? Prostitution?’
‘That’s a great money making model, but it’s not for me. Too messy. I don’t like dealing with people and all their dependences, obsessions and compulsions. I like clean operations.’
I nod. Relieved. ‘What else did you do?’
‘Arms dealing.’
I suppress the frown that wants to knit my forehead. ‘Gun running?’
‘Not just guns. After the fall of communism there was a lot of government arsenal for sale. Long range missiles, tanks, submarines, everything.’
‘Did you sell to the terrorists?’
‘Does the butcher care who buys his meat? I sold to the highest bidder, but I’ll tell you this: the greatest terrorists are governments since I mostly I sold to government-funded terrorists.’
‘If all this is in the past what do you do now?’
‘I specialize in cyber crime.’
‘What kind?’
‘We use sophisticated software to get around the security of banks and the credit card companies, take over their systems, and transfer money into thousands of different accounts that we control. We then move the money so fast and zigzag it through so many different continents it becomes impossible to track.’
I look at him doubtfully. ‘Really? Hackers get caught all the time.’
He shakes his head. ‘The media make a huge fuss over the handfuls of small time hackers operating from their parent’s basement that the authorities catch because they know they can never touch the real criminals. Banks will never reveal how much they are losing because if you knew how many billions are stolen every year by organized crime you would never keep your money in the bank.’
I clear my throat. ‘Is that what you are doing with Lenny?’