Read Traffyck for Free Online Page A

owner and sole employee of Nagy Investigative Agency in Kiev’s Podil District, had rented a camper van. Last year he had traveled in spring, enjoying the Black Sea before tourist season. This year, he postponed a holiday because of bad economic times, but finally made an escape from Kiev for several days due to professional hazards.
    He had been hired to investigate the bombing of a female clinic in the Podil District. While pursuing the case, he had come upon a possible connection between the source of the explosives and a local Orthodox Church leader. When the nature of his investigation leaked out, the summer heat was turned up.
    “The Gypsy versus God’s children,” as one of Kiev’s tabloids put it. The Gypsy making a “baseless” link between Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, a leader in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the bombing of a clinic that performed abortions. “A campaign of lies,” fellow clergymen were calling it. “No evidence of any sort,” Rogoza said during an interview on Kiev Radio, after which he asked men and women of all faiths to pray for him. Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza, who was once rumored to have had a lover other than his wife, but who turned the rumors around, making them seem part of an effort of the Kiev Patriarchate to destroy the obviously valid Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in which he resided.
    A month later, after the Rogoza incident began to cool, came the fatal shooting of a female doctor in front of another Podil female clinic, followed a week later by a bomb through the Gypsy’s office window that filled his butt cheeks with glass and moved his office farther north in Podil. The bombing did not literally move the office, but it did convince Janos to relocate when his two-day hospital stay ended.
    The bomb was not large enough to kill a man, unless he swallowed it. The Kiev militia laboratory technician called it a “double-base, single-base, nitrocellulose magnesium colloid,” sounding like a university lecturer as he explained its operation. None of this interested Janos, except its size. A table tennis ball had shattered his window, exploding on impact and making the glass into shrapnel, which penetrated his slacks where his posterior was exposed at the cut-out lower back of his cheap office chair. Except for the glass in his posterior and a few pieces in his calves, the rest of him had been saved by the backrest of the chair and by the fact that he was bent over asleep on his desk when the bomb exploded.
    It was splendid advertising for the Nagy Investigative Agency: First, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church accuses him of being the anti-Christ; next, one of his clients, a doctor at a Podil female clinic, is murdered; finally, Janos gets bombed in the ass while he’s asleep at his desk.
    As Janos drove through the darkness, he adjusted his position on the bucket seat and could feel the bits of glass still embedded in him. Even his ass was a Gypsy, unable to stay still more than a few minutes because of the stings biting him the way mosquitoes did the previous year at the caravan camp near Odessa when he and Svetlana made love on a moonlit picnic bench in the primitive area of the camp.
    Lakatos played a slow piece now, the violin a voice crying from its E and A strings and moaning from its G and D strings. Voices in the night, the high-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s laugh, the low-pitched ones reminding him of Svetlana’s moan as they made love.
    Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, one of a handful of female investigators in Kiev’s militia. Investigator Svetlana Kovaleva, who called him Gypsy while he was still a member of Kiev’s militia because of his mentor, Lazlo Horvath, who was also called Gypsy, was also Hungarian-Ukrainian, and also played the violin. Svetlana Kovaleva, who vacationed with him last year and made him feel years younger, especially the night she danced for him.
    A waning moonlit