5. Boris in Paris (3 pgs.) – Champions Renaissance

ACT I - CHAPTER 5

BORIS IN PARIS

Saturday October 14, 2017

Paris France

No one would have suspected that Boris Petrov made his living as a detective. He looked like a tourist with his big camera, sunglasses and cap. He was fifty-six years old, but he looked forty. Sitting on the terrace of the Café Moulin Rose he watched Franco Gambino and Lenel Anston having a cappuccino in the elegant café next to the Louvre. They were watching the news on their mobile phone screens. “INCREASE IN NUCLEAR TENSION. NORTH KOREA THREATENS JAPAN”. About six tables away, Boris was recording the conversation, pointing the directional microphone at them, hidden in his camera, which was on the table. The two men were laughing like two bandits who had robbed a train and were counting the money. Sometimes they would put their heads together and talk without anyone being able to hear them.

Boris Petrov had learned everything he knew from the KGB, but when he discovered that a Kremlin gangster had killed his “comrade,” friend and fencing partner Karl Dugin, he devised a plan and stabbed him twenty-three times, once for each year of his life.

A communist, he became disillusioned with the corruption of the Soviet Union and fled to Canada. He then accepted socialism and capitalism. For him, each system had advantages and disadvantages, which worked only with honest judges and precise laws.

When he learned that the Russian mafia had put a price on his head, he underwent surgery on his face and changed his name. He worked as a stockbroker and thanks to his skills he discovered the scam of a financial mafia in Ottawa, information that he sent to the police chief.

The most committed senators ordered that he leave Canada and that the police officer not speak.

A businessman who was a victim of the scam contacted him. Thanks to the evidence that Boris had obtained, several businessmen, politicians and bankers, as well as a judge and the chief of police, had been arrested, tried and imprisoned. It was an operation that lasted a couple of years and the biggest political scandal in Canadian history, but thanks to Boris, justice had been done.

Boris was two meters four tall, very strong and solid, with short blonde hair, a square face, a wide, thin mouth, brown eyes, abundant dark, unkempt eyebrows, very large, wide hands, thick fingers, a deep voice, and he had a strong Russian accent when speaking English. He liked to detect discordant notes in history. I don’t read history, I spy on it, he sometimes thought. From history books he moved on to books on geopolitics, ethics and philosophy. If there are different versions of a fact, someone is lying, he used to think when he reviewed different versions of history, because he knew that a fact could not be the same and different from itself.

Serious like all Russians, but with an explosive laugh at something funny, he knew everything about espionage tactics, psychological warfare and propaganda. He had killed 17 people in his career and was not afraid of death. He had not married and had occasional girlfriends to whom he said he was a photographer.

He was determined to take revenge on the person who had ordered the death of his fencer friend Karl Dugin.

He couldn’t tolerate the bandits getting their way. Taking justice into his own hands was part of his DNA.

Before killing his friend’s murderer, he tortured him into confessing who had given the order and sang: Gambino.

He spent years researching every Gambino in the world and selected five. Of all of them, the one who seemed most suspicious was Franco Gambino. He had met him in his youth in the fencing environment. Most likely it was him, but he needed to have conclusive certainty to kill him.

Lenel paid for the coffees and left a generous tip. “Merci, merci,” said the waiter, bowing. They got up and Boris heard through his directional microphone, “When the sun is on the back of the swan we will meet at the Tower!” said Franco Gambino, speaking in code, at the same time that he saw him stop, click his heels, standing and in a firm position, as in a military salute, bring his right hand into a fist to the center of his chest and slightly raise his head chin in a gesture of pride. As if it were a ritual, Lenel repeated the same movements, placing himself in front. They both bowed and simultaneously continued on their way down the stairs.

Boris’s body tensed, like that of a lion taking an attacking position to capture its prey.