Seven Deadly Samovars Read Online Free

portends of disaster.
    After several rings she heard a barrage of Russian on the other end. “English, please,” she shouted into the phone.
    “Okay. Okay. Slackanov here. What you want?”
    “Mr. Slackanov, this is Goldie Silver from Silver Spoon Antiques in Juneau, Alaska. Angel Batista called you this morning about my problem with the missing shipment of samovars. She said you were checking to see if you ever received them from Minsky & Pinsky in Vladivostok. What did you find?”
    “Oh, yeah, yeah. I talk two times to some guy in your shop. I tell him I can’t find. He yell at me and I hang up. But now your little Angel call and she very nice, so I look up.” There was a silence on the other end of the line.
    For a moment Goldie thought they had been disconnected. “Well, did you find the shipment?”
    “No, no. No shipment. But maybe you didn’t hear about Minsky & Pinsky? Whole place up in smoke. Poof! Like burnt shish-kabob. Only thing we are sending to Alaska, week and a half, maybe two, is shipment of Siberian parkas to Anchorage. Handmade, very good quality. No samovars to Juneau. Sorry.”
    The next thing Goldie heard was a click. After years of experience, she knew that a high percentage of shipments coming to Alaska, especially from Russia, were subject to some mix-up or another. Armed with the information from Slackanov, she decided to check with customs in Anchorage.
    When the customs agent heard her story, he scoffed. “Lady, do you have any idea how many files I have to go through to find out if some fool in Russia mistook a crate of samovars for a crate of parkas?”
    Goldie put on her sweetest voice, syrup dripping from every word as she convinced the reluctant bureaucrat to check the reams of paperwork. When the customs agent came back on the line Goldie let out a whoop of joy. “You did. Thank you. You don’t know how much this means to me. I’ll make all the arrangements. Thanks again.”
    She hung up the phone and dialed a number in Anchorage, which was followed by a call to Alaska Marine Lines. Five minutes later she called out, “Rudy, come over here. You’ll never believe what happened.”
    “Hold yer horses. I’m comin’.” He skidded to a stop in front of her. “Okay, what in tarnation happened that’s got you so het up?”
    “Apparently some idiot at Pistov bundled our crate in with parkas going to Anchorage. The customs office got a call three days ago from Wilderness Wear on Spenard Road. Seems like they received someone else’s shipment of samovars and Russian antiques along with their fur coats. Of course, no one bothered to track us down. Apparently our name was misspelled on the packing slip.”
    “Well, that’s just great, Goldilocks. Them church ladies will be plum tickled. How long do you reckon it’ll take for those dang teapots to get here?”
    Goldie frowned. “That’s the hitch, Rudy. The customs guy said there’s all kinds of paperwork, and Alaska Marine lines only load on Fridays, so they still won’t be here for about a week and a half.” Goldie threw up her hands in exasperation. “Why can’t just one thing be easy?”
     

FIVE
     
           Godiva slumped down in the plush limo seat, clutched her latte vente, and grumbled all the way to LAX. “It’s inhuman, getting up so early to catch an eight o’clock flight. What were we thinking? Couldn’t we travel at a civilized noon?”
    Caesar patted her knee. “There, there my love. Once we get on the plane you can sleep all the way to Seattle.”
    Chili looked over her shoulder. “And you can sleep all the way to Juneau, too, Auntie. Glad we didn’t get the ‘milk run’. That one stops at Ketchikan, Wrangell and Sitka. It takes forever and I can’t wait to get there and show Caesar my home town.”
    They crawled along in the security line for over an hour until they finally made their way to the gate and arrived just in time for boarding.
    As they settled into their seats in the second