Free The Domino Game by Greg Wilson

safe. Not here in your apartment. Somewhere else, close by.”
    Nikolai’s eyes darted as his mind played options. “Most of the apartments upstairs are vacant.”
    “Good.” Vari nodded emphatically. “That will do.” He crossed to the video, ejected the second cassette and began gathering up the loose pages from the coffee table.
    ‘They’re probably all locked,” Nikolai added as an afterthought. Vari paused and looked at him with dismay. “You think that’s a problem?”
    They picked the top floor and chose the flat on the southern end that had been empty for the best part of a year.
    Nikolai stood sentry at the top of the stairs while his partner worked at the lock. Less than a minute and Vari was inside, two more and he was back out again. He eased the door closed behind him, tried the knob a final time, nodded to himself in satisfaction and began padding back across the deserted lobby. Nikolai watched him as he approached. Saw the hard resolve of his expression and measured confidence of his gait and realized that Vari had already absorbed the impact of their betrayal and was now navigating a familiar terrain of duplicity and deception wholly by instinct. It was a realization that shocked him. This wasn’t his world. It was a world of quicksand and mirrors and it occurred to Nikolai just how inadequately equipped he was to deal with it.
    Vari stopped a pace away and spoke in a low whisper. ‘The kitchen, okay? There’s a space between the back of the stove and the wall.”
    Nikolai answered with an uncertain nod. “So. What next?”
    “Next, little brother, we go for a walk and we talk about options.” The older man clamped his hands on Nikolai’s shoulders and studied him intently, eye to eye. “And then, you have some very big decisions to make.”
    Nikolai scrawled a note for Natalia telling her he would be back late afternoon. That she should not worry and that he was sorry – for everything – and he loved her. He read it again then slid it under a glass on the sink, grabbed his leather jacket and his cell phone from the bedroom, his keys from the table in the hall and followed his partner down the stairs and out to the street.
    The narrow pavements were sprinkled with Saturday pedestrians determined to make the most of the shallow, spring sunshine, the curbs beside them packed to compression with vehicles of every make. Moscow hadn’t been designed for cars. Ten years ago they’d been almost a novelty, twenty a rarity, but now they seemed to be breeding like mice – an endless supply of hand-me-downs, rejects and insurance write-offs flooding in by the trainload from the affluent West. Not to mention, of course, those that were stolen to order, car-napped from the streets of Budapest or Prague or Warsaw, whisked into containers, shipped across borders and rolled back onto the streets of Moscow with a new identity inside twenty-four hours. But then given the necessary reward for risk ratio, nowadays these tended to be largely from the quality end of the market, destined for buyers who didn’t have to park on the street. Cars were just like everything else the long-suffering Russian people had been deprived of for so long. Like children let loose in a toy shop, they wanted them and wanted them now, whatever the cost. Whether having them was a good thing, a bad thing or even necessary was completely irrelevant.
    Vari set off to the left, past a filthy, dented late model Saab with a thick scum of dried sleet and smog baked on its windshield, heading towards the gray dome of the Olympic stadium that hung like a tent above the building-jostled skyline. Nikolai fell in alongside him and turned to him to speak.
    “Why couldn’t we talk upstairs?”
    Vari threw him a forbearing glance. “Because, little brother, it is highly probable that Mr Ivankov would like to have his home movies back before they do him any real damage, and because it is probable also that by now he has concluded that you