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someone had pulled out the cold storage fuses, spoiling thousands of euros’ worth of food. Soon after, some customers got food poisoning, which was traced back to a batch of goat cheese that had been injected with salmonella. That was when Monika decided to get a bodyguard, and I happened to be the only woman available for the job.
    I hadn’t been working for Monika very long when someone tried to poison her. The perp had bad luck; I took a sniff of Monika’s cup of tea before I let her drink it. Not everyone can detect the smell of cyanide. Worried that the news would scare away customers, she didn’t file a police report. After that, I tasted all the food and drink that had not been made in her own kitchen. Three days later one of the chefs called in sick and never returned, and that was the end of the incidents. Still, Monika kept me on her payroll. We liked each other, and I ended up also working as her part-time housekeeper and chauffeur. She was a Swedish-speaking Finn, so we mostly communicated in Swedish, which improved my language skills immensely.
    Mike Virtue would have been pissed off if he’d seen me using the security skills he’d taught me to do domestic work. Working for Monika was almost like being on vacation. I would have grown tired of it eventually; when she decided to turn her life upside down and move to one of the poorest countries in the world, Mozambique, I was actually relieved because it forced me to focus on my career. Monika was an idealist; she believed that everyone should have access to good food regardless of wealth, and she planned on using the money she’d collected from rich Finnish foodies to help those who were hungry in Mozambique. This created some buzz in the media, even outside of Finland, because people couldn’t accept what she was doing—why would someone leave a successful institution like Chez Monique and her role as a famous television chef to live among the poor and cook them antelope or whatever it was they ate in Africa?
    On the last day before the restaurant closed, Monika hosted a dinner for her regulars, and one of them was Anita Nuutinen. During the meal Anita asked Monika how she had the guts to go to Mozambique alone, while she was afraid to go by herself to nearby Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
    “You wouldn’t happen to need a bodyguard, would you? I have just the woman for the job,” offered Monika instead of answering Anita’s question, and that’s how I ended up working with Anita. And as I found out, that job was tougher than working for Monika. Anita had just one goal in life: to make as much money as possible. Then again, it was pretty easy to handle a person like that. Money forced Anita to take risks, but mostly in the financial sphere—she’d already done her best to protect her physical well-being. So no, it wouldn’t have made any sense for her to be traipsing around by herself near the Frunzenskaya subway station. It was an area where she would have never walked alone.
    Avoiding the police would put my guard’s license at risk. I needed to work with them on this case. I wished I could remember anything at all about what happened after I’d stepped out of the bar. All I could still see in my mind’s eye was the solid wood door. Had that door been hiding a guard who had seen what went down on the street? Could he tell the police he had seen me leave without Anita? Or had he witnessed something else?
    I knew I needed to take a break to practice my breathing or I’d have a panic attack. Once I calmed myself down, I weighed my options. I would have to give myself more time to try to remember what had happened. Meanwhile, I’d attempt to get in touch with Paskevich. I didn’t know to what extent the Moscow militia was investigating Anita’s case. In fact, now that I thought about it more, it was weird that someone had called to threaten me. Wouldn’t that mean that Anita’s death could in no way be a hit-and-run? Was Paskevich really so