Page 70 of Goodbye Girl
“What sort of development?”
“It turns out that this Theo Knight is friends with Imani, the pop star Natasha is crazy about,” he said, meaning his daughter. “I’ve been trying for months to get her to do a private concert for Natasha and her friends.”
“What my granddaughter wants, my granddaughter gets.”
“And it finally looks like she will get it. Imani’s people reached out this week. Between telling her fans to pirate her music and the legal fees she’s racked up lately, I think Imani needs some quick cash.”
“How much?”
“Money is not the issue. It’s the location. My original plan was to have her perform for Natasha and her friends in London.”
“You should avoid going back to London for a while,” said Kava.
“Understood. Her people have proposed your estate in Miami Beach.”
“That’s ridiculous. I just spent three weeks fighting your extradition to America in the London courts. Now you want to show up in Miami Beach at a party for your daughter? Have you lost your mind?”
“You’re right,” said Sergei. “I can’t go. But Natasha can. And so can you.”
Kava smiled. One advantage of having passed control of the piracy business to his son was that Vladimir Kava was no longer on the front line of extradition efforts under U.S. law.
“You didn’t have to fly all the way out here to ask me to take my granddaughter to a party,” he said.
“There’s more to it than that,” said Sergei. “Imani has a certain condition that must be met before she will go onstage.”
“Let me guess. She wants two cases of 1959 Dom Pérignon delivered to her room so she can bathe in it?”
“That would be easier,” said Sergei, laughing. Then he turned serious. “She wants a private, face-to-face conversation with you. She wants to hear it straight from your mouth that if she performs the concert, we will rescind the hit order on Theo Knight.”
“After this Mr. Knight and his MAP friends kidnapped my son and tried to put him in prison for the rest of his life?”
“That is Imani’s demand,” said Sergei.
Kava looked out toward the open sea. “Do you want me to make this deal?”
“Natasha wants the concert.”
“That was not my question,” he said, giving his son an assessing look. “I asked if you want me to make this deal for Theo Knight?”
“Yes. Make it.”
“Done,” said Kava.
“But...”
Sergei finished his glass of vodka and poured both him and his father another from the bottle on ice.
“But what?”
“No one can guarantee that another man will live forever. Accidents happen.”
Vladimir smiled widely, raising his glass. “I’ve taught you well, Sergei.”
Chapter 27
The rhythmic steel-on-steel clap of a train moving through London’s Underground was rocking Theo to sleep in his seat.
The death threat from Kava had been keeping him up at night, so a few moments of shut-eye on the train were “makeup winks.” He’d told Uncle Cy he was staying in London to look after Gigi, and that was mostly true. It was also true that, with a Russian hit man looking for a Black American man alone on the run, moving around London with a teenage girl was decent cover.