Red Templar by Paul Christopher Read Free Book Online Page B

suggest?” Holliday asked.
    “Argentina, Venezuela. Best would be American. Spic, yes?”
    “Puerto Rican?”
    “Yes. You, too, must be American, of course, unless you like to be Canadian. Canada is very easy.”
    “I’ll stick with my own country for now.”
    “Okay, yes, easy-peasy, you know.” Victor nodded, sucking a straw stuck in a bottle of livid green Fanta passion fruit and orange Taste of Africa.
    “Are these forged documents or real?” Holliday asked.
    “Oh, very genuine.”
    “How do you get them?”
    “Not me, oh, no, I have no way of knowing this, really, but I have a friend. . . .”
    “I thought you might.” Holliday nodded.
    “His name is Gennadi. Good friend.”
    “Where does he live?”
    “Odessa. Not far, twenty minutes on bus.
Psssht!
We are there.”
    “Easy-peasy,” Holliday said.
    “Right,” said Viktor, speaking around the straw. His tongue was as green as the walls.
    Holliday wondered how far they were from Chernobyl. “Easy-peasy.”
    *  *  *
    Gennadi Bondarenko lived in an old yellow stucco building in the Privoz district of Odessa, close to the railway station. In the old days the apartment would probably have been shared by at least three families, but now it was just Bondarenko and his voluptuous girlfriend, whose name was Natasha.
    There was a large living room/kitchen/dining room with a huge round caramel-colored velvet couch that could have slept two couples comfortably, expensive-looking Persian carpets, an eating island that jutted out between two massive windows covered in drooping velvet curtains the same color as the couch, and a refrigerator in one corner and a strange gas-powered hot plate that sat on the kitchen counters with its big propane supply right beside it.
    Built-in nineteenth-century cupboards and shelves covered the walls, which were painted a uniform sallow cream color. One area of open wall six feet wide and eight feet high had been painted flat white, for some unknown reason.
    Outside the bustling street seemed to be a combination farmer’s market, tailgate junk sale and pickup stroll for hookers. According to Gennadi, the party went on twenty-four/seven and drew no ethnic or religious borders. Jews, Asians, locals and anyone else sold whatever people wanted. Gennadi specialized in selling documents.
    Bondarenko had been born on the Lower East Side of New York in the old Ukrainian part of the city and spent most of the first fifteen years of his life in a fourth-floor walk-up on Second Avenue. In 1999, his grandparents from Odessa had died, leaving the family farm to his parents. The parents went home, and with nothing else to do the young teenage Gennadi had been forced to go along with them.
    Now he was what his mother and father called a charter member of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Brotherhood, a colloquial term for the Russian-Ukrainian-Georgian crime family run by the Solntsevskaya gang out of Moscow. Bondarenko denied it, but the tattoos of crowned skulls and ornate stars that covered both arms told a different story. Now in his late twenties, Bondarenko was lean, with a shaved head, hooked nose and dark, suspicious eyes.
    “Five thousand dollars U.S. for everything,” he said, sprawled on the big couch smoking an evil-smelling Veraya cigarette. Natasha was curled up beside him, a vision swelling out of bulging silver hot pants and a red Victoria’s Secret push-up bra. She was either sleeping off a drunk or stoned out of her mind. Bondarenko used her large, upthrust hip as an armrest.
    “I don’t have that kind of cash on me,” said Holliday. “I’d have to go to a bank. Besides, I’d like to see what I’m getting first.”
    “Not a problem, bro,” said the Ukrainian thug. “I take Visa, MasterCard, Carte Bleue.”
    Using Natasha’s ample rear end to brace himself, Bondarenko levered himself off the big couch and disappeared from the room. When he returned he had a fistful of various passports. He sat down on a bar