To Kill the Duke (31 page)

chapter one

“The face of tyranny is always mild at first.”
— Jean Racine

“We brought you to Hollywood for your individuality, but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.” As told to F. Scott Fitzgerald when he arrived in Hollywood to try his hand at writing movie scripts.
— Found in ‘Thesaurus of Quotations’

“Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.”
— John Wayne as Captain Nathan Brittles in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”

B
oris Gila was reading memos. It seemed reading memos had become his life since he had been promoted and had been at the new job for a few years. These were ordinary day-to-day memos about many topics. None of these memos dealt with the project to assassinate John Wayne; the Wayne memos were all in code. The memos on his desk, he hated like a meal that had gone bad. The memos he hated were short on ideas and very long on words. Boris didn’t write memos to his
boss — Mr. Zavert. Boris created very short and precise reports and they had the immediate impact of creating
more
work for Boris, because Mr. Zavert had fallen in love with Boris Gila’s reports.

Sometimes I wish I was still cooking
Boris thought as he poured over Mr. Zavert’s responses to his own reports on how Alexi and Ivan were progressing in Hollywood. Boris glanced at the mountains of paperwork on his desk and made a mental note to cook himself a huge French dinner that would leave him oodles of leftovers and make his weekend less stressful. Boris needed less stress in his life — especially with all the stress he was putting on himself in regards to seeing John Wayne’s assassination carried out. After all, it had been a few years since the project had started and there had yet to be one bullet fired at Wayne, let alone a knife thrown at him, or a bomb thrown under his car or even a drop of poison placed in the Duke’s food.

“I really wish I was just a local spy with being a cook as my smokescreen,” Boris muttered to himself all the time when he looked at the piles of paper on his desk. Sometimes he muttered ‘toughski shitski,’ because Alexei had filled him in on why Alex had invented that phrase before they left for Hollywood. Most of the time he thought about cooking before he attacked the piles of paperwork. He took another look at the paperwork and made a face as if he was looking at a woefully under-cooked meal.

Not only was he trying to keep up with Alexi and Ivan, but also with all the other projects he had been put in charge of.

Mr. Zavert and the people Mr. Zavert called his ‘superiors’ had bestowed other programs of importance upon Boris’ shoulders. In addition to seeing that John Wayne was assassinated, Boris was in charge of eliminating anyone who knew about the incident (and couldn’t be trusted) in which comrade Stalin had died in the saddle.

The first such liquidation went very easily. Boris was told to kill the man that Alexei had knocked out that night in Stalin’s room. Boris went to this man’s apartment on an early Saturday morning and knocked on the door. When the man answered the knock — Boris shot him right between the eyes with a pistol that was equipped with an extra-large silencer that did a great job of keeping the noise down.

The second assassination proved to be a lot tougher. The man who enjoyed anal sex was supposed to have killed the Dietrich look-a-like.
That man did not carry out his orders. He wanted the girl for himself, so he killed a homeless woman and tried to pass her off as the girl who had been the last woman to have had sex with their former leader. The man thought this would be very easy, because he had bashed in the now-dead homeless woman’s face with a shovel and then set her body on fire. Everyone thought that the man had done his duty until his work started to suffer. This man’s name was Dmitri. Dmitri had become so smitten with the Marlene Dietrich look-a-like he started to take a lot of sick days.

A
lot
of sick days.

Dmitri’s work grew sloppy.

When he did show up for work, he complained about being tired all the time.

Dmitri also talked way too much about his sex life to fellow spies, soldiers and bodyguards.

That is when Mr. Zavert asked Boris to investigate.

Dmitri had set up the Dietrich look-a-like, whose real name was Natasha, in an apartment in Moscow that was actually located in the same building where Ivan Viznapu thought he had learned all there was to know about being Stalin’s projectionist. All Dmitri wanted was sex, sex and more sex (and not all of it anal) from Natasha. All Natasha wanted to do was to please Dmitri; otherwise she would be dead.

“Not much of an alternative,” Alexi said in a coded message back to Boris.

Most would agree.

“Once he had her, he couldn’t stop,” Boris told Mr. Zavert, after Mr. Zavert had congratulated Boris on a job well done.

“I can never understand why some men can’t keep it in their pants, whether they are with one woman or a multitude of women,” Mr. Zavert said to Boris. “That’s why I stay in power,” he added.

“Because you’re in control of everything,” Boris replied.

“I have seen far too many men lose everything over pussy. Stalin used to tell me that pussy ruled the globe,” Mr. Zavert said.

“But it doesn’t, if men can control their urges,” Boris said.

“Power rules the world, for those men who know how to handle pussy,” Mr. Zavert said. “Never let the little head overrule the big head.”

“Especially if you don’t want to end up like Dmitri,” Boris said.

“People need to control their addictions better,” Mr. Zavert suddenly said to Boris.

“I am not aware that I am addicted to anything, comrade,” responded Boris.

“Silly! Not me. Not you. But the masses. If Russians get too addicted to the wrong things, we all might end up like Dmitri,” Mr. Zavert said.

And how Dmitri ended up wasn’t pretty.

Boris had been amazed at Dmitri’s toughness. It seemed the more Boris and his subordinates tortured Dmitri, the stronger he’d become. Boris had to find out where the girl was… vaporize her, and then do the same to Dmitri. Things were not going well, until one day when Boris took out his garbage.

It had been a long, hot summer in Moscow and Boris had been away from his apartment for three weeks, attending to other matters. Unfortunately, his brain had been preoccupied and his garbage hadn’t been properly disposed of, so there was a lot of spoilage from the last meal he had cooked for himself before leaving home. It had been a major French meal and he’d prepared it to relieve the stress of all those damn memos. The leftovers had spoiled and along with the high humidity, it had all turned into a lot of maggots.

Thousands of them.

Boris hated maggots, and he cursed himself for not having found someone to watch his apartment and take out the garbage while he was on his mission(s). He made a note to find someone to watch his place the next time he was gone. He wasn’t allowed to hire a maid, because Mr. Zavert was afraid that maids would find something in spies’ homes that they weren’t supposed to. A subordinate would be the perfect person to watch his place, and that subordinate would eat quite well.

“At least it wasn’t manure or animal dung that brought out these maggots,” he said aloud as walked to the store to purchase the bleach that would not only kill off the maggots, but clean his garbage can as well.

Flies, when considering where to lay their eggs, loved manure and animal shit more than spoiled leftovers and rotten meat. Since Boris didn’t have a garden or an animal, he knew right away it was the spoiled leftovers — especially the meat — that had brought him the disgusting, creamy, white crawling maggots. As he was cleaning the trash bin and killing the maggots, he came up with the idea that would finally break Dmitri, which he put into action after he took a bath… a long bath.

After his body and both his garbage cans were clean, Boris went to the prison where Dmitri was being held. It wasn’t a standard prison or even a dungeon. Just a simple brick building in a nondescript part of Moscow that sat on a large parking lot with no neighbors. Anyone who walked or took public transportation by the building would think it was nothing more than a mid-size warehouse with offices in it. There were a few trucks parked on the sides of the building that didn’t work. They were there for show.

Once one entered the building, it was a totally different atmosphere.

“I always liked the cliché that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” Mr. Zavert had told Boris when Mr. Zavert first showed Boris the prison.

“I thought you liked puns,” Boris said to his boss.

“What’s a pun, comrade?” Mr. Zavert responded as he wiped his dark glasses without taking them off.

Boris said nothing and marveled at the state-of-the-art prison.

Security was everywhere. Large cameras where everywhere. Locked doors and heavy bullet-proof windows dominated every room. And the room where the prisoners were kept was right out of a Victor Hugo novel. Dark, cold, wet, and the prisoners were chained to the walls and were forced to sit near their own excrement and urine, if they were lucky enough to have been fed some food and water and could hold it in their bladders. Once a day, a very large guard would hose the prisoners down after throwing a bucket of lukewarm soapy water on them. There were a few side rooms where the real abuse took place. It was into one of those rooms that Boris now stepped.

He turned his key and opened the door and stared at his prey, who was sitting tied up to the lone chair in the room. Dmitri was only clothed in shorts and sandals. A hood with a small hole in the nose area for breathing was moving slightly. Boris walked around the chair twice and out of
the corner of his eyes watched Dmitri’s hooded head turn to the sound of his footsteps.

Boris had decided to give the man one last try at telling him where Natasha was hiding.

“Comrade, if you do not tell me where your girlfriend is, I cannot stop what’s going to happen to you,” Boris said.

“You can’t kill me or you will never find her and what she knows,” a defiant Dmitri said.