“We Need It More,” My Ex Declared, Stealing My Car—Unaware of the Surprise Hidden in the Trunk
“Verochka, how absolutely dreadful! I couldn’t stop worrying when I heard,” Marina, the deputy governor’s wife, lowered her voice to an intimate whisper, even though the entire ballroom of the Metropol Hotel was buzzing around us. “Leaving a woman without a car in this day and age is simply barbaric.”
I looked at her perfect manicure wrapped around the stem of a champagne glass. Charity receptions were always stuffy, even when the air-conditioning was running at full power.
“A terrible situation,” I agreed, carefully taking a glass of prosecco from a passing waiter.
“And the police can’t do anything, I hear?” Marina leaned closer. Her eyes gleamed with that particular kind of high-society curiosity that feeds on other people’s minor catastrophes. “Was it stolen right from your courtyard? What about the cameras?”
“The cameras recorded everything.” I took a small sip. The prosecco was too warm. “The image quality is excellent. You can see their faces perfectly.”
“Then why aren’t they looking for them?” she gasped, pressing her free hand against the diamond brooch at her collarbone.
“They aren’t looking for them, Marina.” I smiled slightly, gazing past her shoulder at the crystal chandelier. “They’ve already been found.”
She didn’t know the details, and I had no intention of telling her.
The rumor that a brand-new SUV belonging to the region’s notoriously controversial investigative journalist had been stolen while she was away on vacation spread across the city in two days. People love it when those who dig through other people’s sins become victims themselves.
What they didn’t know about was the black equipment case.
A week earlier, I had picked up a used but monstrously powerful Mitsubishi Pajero from the dealership. Three and a half million rubles, half of it financed.
I needed a vehicle capable of crawling through logging-truck ruts in the northern districts of the region, places where no respectable sedan would dare venture. My newsroom was preparing a confidential special investigation into illegal logging.
The day before my long-awaited flight to Turkey, Misha, the television station’s head of security—a gloomy retired officer—personally loaded a heavy Pelican-brand plastic case into the trunk of my new SUV.
“Let it stay with you for a while,” Misha said, checking twice that the trunk was locked. “The newsroom is like a train station right now, one inspection after another. And this, Vera, is a toy belonging to a federal agency. We rented it for three weeks under the general director’s personal guarantee.”
“What’s inside?” I asked, looking at the unremarkable black case.
“A secure communications and scanning system.” Misha lowered his voice. “It costs as much as two of your cars. There’s a government GPS beacon built into it, and the signal goes directly to a control center in Moscow. It can’t be switched off, and ordinary Chinese jammers can’t block it. It gives off a signal even underground. You’re leaving the car in the guarded parking lot outside your building, right?”
“Of course.” I nodded. “Under the cameras.”
I really did leave it under the cameras.
I had simply forgotten about Igor.
Marina continued chirping about insurance compensation while I looked at my phone screen. There was an unread message from my ex-husband, sent three hours earlier.
You simply don’t understand what kind of situation you’re putting us in with your accusations. Withdraw the police report. Stop disgracing the family.
I swiped the notification away.
We hadn’t been a family for a year and a half. My phone rang while I was standing in line for passport control in Antalya. The airport air smelled of disinfectant and sweet coffee.
Igor’s name appeared on the screen.
We hadn’t spoken for three months—not since we had finally divided the last of our savings. He had managed to take slightly more than half, arguing that his mother needed her bathroom renovated while I “earned plenty anyway.”
By then, I was too tired to argue, so I simply gave him the money.
“Yes?” I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear while pulling my passport out of my handbag.
“Vera, just don’t start screaming,” Igor said cheerfully, using the same tone he had always used before announcing that he had spent our vacation savings on a new set of alloy wheels. “We took your car.”
The line moved forward by a meter. I mechanically stepped after it.
“What do you mean, you took it?” I stopped.
“Well, we moved it,” Igor chuckled.
In the background, I clearly heard Tamara Vasilyevna’s voice.
“Tell her not to invent a problem out of nothing.”
“I stopped by your place yesterday to collect my old winter jackets from the balcony,” my ex-husband continued. “You weren’t there, and the car was just sitting outside. So we thought…”
“How did you start it?” My voice became completely flat.
“I found the key,” Igor replied carelessly. “There was a spare one in Mom’s cabinet, left over from when you gave her an extra set of keys to the apartment. The car fob was hanging there too. The key from your old car didn’t work, but this one fit the new one perfectly. Apparently, the dealership never reprogrammed the alarm system.”
I closed my eyes.
My mistake.
My enormous, stupid mistake.
Three months earlier, when we had moved apart, I had noticed that one of the spare keys was missing. Igor had shrugged and claimed it had probably been lost during the move.
I knew he was lying. I had seen the way his eyes shifted.
But I was so exhausted from the arguments and from dividing every last fork that I let it go. I was too lazy to drive to the dealership and pay twenty-five thousand rubles to reprogram the locks and erase the old key from the system’s memory.
I thought, what use would he have for a key to a car whose registration documents he didn’t possess?
“Put the car back,” I said quietly.
“Vera, why are you starting this?” Igor exhaled irritably into the phone. “We need it more right now. Mom’s gardening season has started, and her knees hurt. Do you expect her to carry seedlings on the bus? You have no idea how difficult life is for ordinary people. You earn a high salary, and the television station pays for your business trips.”
“It is my car.”
“It’s just sitting in the parking lot while you’re flying around!” A shrill note crept into his voice, a sure sign that he was moving onto the offensive. “It’s taking up space. We have to drive to the country house every day. I’ll return it when you come back. And don’t even think about causing a scene.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“Go ahead!” He laughed openly. “You’ll wear yourself out trying to prove anything in court! I have the key. I’ll say you gave me permission. By the time they open a case and investigate, you’ll already be back from your vacation. And we have no other way to get to the country house. That’s it. Goodbye. Don’t ruin your holiday.”
He hung up.
I approached the border officer’s booth and handed over my passport. The uniformed man looked at me, then at the photograph, and stamped it.
“Welcome to Turkey,” he said in English.
I walked into the baggage-claim area, found an empty bench, and sat down.
They had not gone to the country house.
Igor and Tamara Vasilyevna’s country house was forty kilometers north of the city. I opened an application on my phone, a simple program synchronized with my dashboard camera.
The car had been online twenty minutes earlier.
Its last recorded location was the Southern Industrial Zone—a deserted district of old Soviet garage cooperatives where there wasn’t a single country house, but there were plenty of workshops staffed by people who didn’t ask unnecessary questions.
I stared at the red dot on the map.
I could have called him again.
I could have started screaming, threatening, or begging.
I could have ruined my first vacation in two years by spending the entire trip on the phone with the local police officer, trying to prove that my ex-husband was a thief.
Instead, I stood up, walked to the bar in the arrivals hall, and ordered myself a glass of prosecco.
I smiled at the bartender, paid by card, and sat down at a table.
Let them drive it around. On the third day of my vacation, I was lying on a sun lounger, watching the sun sink below the horizon and turn the sea a deep peach color.
A glass of ice-cold water stood on the low table beside me.
My phone vibrated.
Misha.
“Vera,” the security chief said without his usual joking tone. His voice was extremely dry. Extremely official. “Where are you?”
“In Kemer, Misha. I filed the vacation request.”
“And where is your car?”
“In the parking lot outside my building. It should be.”
“It isn’t in the parking lot.” Misha breathed heavily into the phone. “Moscow has been blowing up my phone for the past hour. The supervisors from the agency want to know why their top-secret secure communications system, which was supposed to remain inside a locked trunk in a safe location, is currently moving around the territory of the Avtomobilist-3 garage cooperative.”
I ran a hand over my forehead.
The air was warm and humid, but a chill ran down my spine.
“My ex-husband stole it,” I said in a perfectly calm voice. “Three days ago. He said he was borrowing it to drive to the country house. He still had an old key.”
A long and extremely expressive silence followed.
“To the country house?” Misha finally repeated. “Vera, VIN numbers are altered at Avtomobilist-3. That place is a black hole. Cars are driven there to be dismantled or given new documents. There aren’t any country houses there.”
I remained silent.
I already knew there weren’t any country houses there.
But until that moment, some part of me—the same sentimental fool who had lived with Igor for eight years—was still trying to find an excuse for him.
Maybe he had gone there to repair the suspension.
Maybe he had stopped by to see a mechanic he knew.
No.
Igor had never intended to return the car after my vacation.
He knew the loan was in my name. He knew I would have to continue paying it for another three years.
And he had decided he could simply take the car, sell it whole or for parts through some shady scheme, and then tell me it had been “stolen outside a supermarket while he went inside to buy bread.”
His mother, naturally, would confirm his story.
“He’s planning to sell it,” I said aloud, voicing what I had understood back at the airport.
“He’s an idiot,” Misha stated. “Did he open the trunk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Moscow can see the beacon. The signal is stable.” Something metallic clicked on Misha’s end of the line. He was probably playing with the lighter on his desk. “Listen carefully. Take a piece of paper and send me written authorization through the messenger app, granting access to your vehicle due to suspected theft. I’ll forward it to our criminal-investigation department and to the agency supervisors.”
“Will he go to prison?” I asked.
Not out of pity. I was simply clarifying the facts.
“There is federal equipment registered on the agency’s books inside that vehicle,” Misha replied harshly. “This won’t be treated as a simple car theft. It depends on who he is trying to sell it to right now. Are you giving us the green light?”
I looked out at the sea.
At the perfectly straight line of the horizon.
I remembered standing in an empty apartment a year and a half earlier, after Igor had taken even some of my books because, according to him, “they were purchased during the marriage.”
I remembered his shrill voice on the phone.
You’ll wear yourself out trying to prove anything in court!
“You have it,” I said. “The green light.”
“Enjoy your vacation, Vera.”
Misha disconnected.
I picked up my phone and typed a short message granting authorization. Then I sent it.
Afterward, I opened my photo gallery and found a picture of Igor, an old one in which he was smiling beside our previous car.
I looked at it for about ten seconds.
I didn’t delete it.
I simply locked the screen and went swimming. I later learned how everything had happened that evening in the Southern Industrial Zone from the dry police reports and Misha’s far more colorful retelling.
Igor had indeed driven my SUV to a garage belonging to a group of resellers.
They were not merely petty crooks. They were a serious crew specializing in legalizing stolen luxury vehicles.
How a building-materials sales manager had come into contact with people like that remained a mystery.
The most ridiculous part was that he had brought Tamara Vasilyevna with him.
Apparently, my former mother-in-law, who had controlled every kopeck her son earned throughout his life, did not trust him to negotiate the sale of a stolen car alone.
She stood in the middle of the oil-stained garage, which reeked of diesel fuel, wearing her formal burgundy coat and haggling over the winter tires stored inside the vehicle.
They were discussing the deposit.
The reseller, a bald man with a tattoo on his neck, had already pulled out a bundle of cash.
Igor was assuring him that the car was clean, the keys were original, and the owner was “an idiot who’s in Turkey right now and won’t notice anything for another two weeks.”
They had no idea that the exits around the garage cooperative had already been silently blocked for twenty minutes.
The special-forces officers did not knock on the doors.
They entered hard, in the classic fashion, blasting through the door and using a stun grenade.
Because the equipment inside the trunk belonged to a federal agency, the operation was not conducted by ordinary district officers but by serious men in heavy tactical gear.
When the officers forced everyone face-down onto the concrete floor, Tamara Vasilyevna began screaming that she was a pensioner and had a heart condition.
“This is a mistake!” Igor yelled, his cheek pressed into a puddle of engine oil. “This is my wife’s car! My ex-wife’s! I only borrowed it for a drive!”
The officers silently opened the trunk.
The black case was still there.
“Who does this belong to?” an investigator asked, nudging the case with his boot.
“I don’t know!” Igor thrashed in his handcuffs. “It’s some junk of hers! We didn’t touch it!”
The bald reseller realized that he was about to be charged not merely with receiving stolen property, but with stealing federal equipment as part of an organized criminal group.
He immediately began cooperating with the investigation.
“They brought it here.” He nodded toward Igor and his mother. “They said the car belonged to them. They wanted two million in cash immediately, without any documents. They offered to have the identification numbers altered. I was barely involved. I just happened to be passing by.”
When Tamara Vasilyevna heard this, she gasped, rolled her eyes, and theatrically collapsed against the hood of my Pajero.
Her fainting spell did not save her from being taken away in the police van.
Igor called me the next day.
He was calling from his lawyer’s phone at the temporary detention center.
I was sitting on the hotel terrace, drinking coffee and eating a croissant.
“Vera!” Igor’s voice broke into a falsetto. It was filled with genuine, unmistakable panic. “Vera, thank God! You have to tell them!”
“Tell them what, Igor?” I broke off a piece of flaky pastry.
“That we had an agreement! That you gave me the car!” He was gasping for breath. “Vera, they’re charging me as part of an organized criminal group! They say Mom and I tried to sell government equipment! What equipment, Vera? What were you transporting in there?”
I remained silent.
“Vera, please tell them,” he continued.
His voice suddenly became pathetic and pleading, like that of a child who has broken a vase and is begging his mother to tell his father that the cat did it.
He genuinely believed I was about to make everything go away.
That, as always, I would sigh, clean up the mess he had created, and say that nothing terrible had happened.
“They put Mom in a cell,” he said. “Her blood pressure is dangerously high. Vera, it was only a car! We’re family! We aren’t strangers! Tell them you gave us permission to take it!”
I watched a seagull strutting shamelessly along the terrace railing.
“I told you not to touch my car,” I said slowly and clearly. “You stole it and tried to sell it to resellers. They have already given statements.”
“But I… I was only…” He stammered as his entire view of the world began cracking apart.
He didn’t understand.
He refused to understand that the rules had changed.
“Vera, you can’t do this!” he cried. “Over a piece of metal?”
“You’ll wear yourself out trying to prove that in court,” I replied, repeating his own words back to him.
Then I ended the call.
I never spoke to him again. My car was returned to me a week later, on the morning after I came home from vacation.
Misha personally met me outside the department headquarters.
The vehicle was standing in the official parking lot, washed and gleaming in the sunlight.
The investigators had finished processing the evidence. The black case had been safely removed and transported back to the television station.
I walked around the SUV.
Not a single scratch.
Even the amount of fuel remaining in the tank was exactly the same as before my flight.
Misha handed me a set of keys.
The same duplicate key that Igor had once “lost” was now hanging from a metal ring.
I reached into my handbag and took out a small souvenir I had purchased from a Turkish shop on the final day of my vacation.
It was a keychain—a funny little wooden monkey with its hands covering its eyes.
I threaded the key ring through the keychain’s chain.
The metal made a quiet clinking sound.
“So,” Misha said, putting his hands into his jacket pockets. “Going home?”
“To the newsroom.”
I opened the driver’s door.
The interior smelled of new leather and faintly of Misha’s expensive tobacco. Apparently, he had driven the vehicle there himself.
“I need to write an article,” I continued. “The easiest one of my life.”
“About the illegal loggers?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
“About them.”
I climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.
It roared evenly and powerfully.
I placed my hands on the steering wheel and looked straight ahead.
Igor’s lawyer had sent me a lengthy letter that morning, offering compensation and asking me to soften my testimony.
Tamara Vasilyevna was in the prison hospital after suffering a hypertensive crisis.
They were facing between five and eight years in prison.
I knew the trial would be long.
I knew I would see their faces in the courtroom more than once.
I shifted the transmission into drive and pulled out of the parking lot onto the avenue.
The wooden monkey hanging from the keys swayed gently with the movement of the car.
Why do people take what belongs to someone else with such confidence, sincerely believing that they will never face any consequences?
