The third man in, p.10
The Third Man In, page 10
We made small talk while he found an image online, printed it off, and fit it into a frame. Cameras ran in the Prokorov family. His grandfather had been “Official Kremlin Artist,” Prokorov said. Language had its limits, so it wasn’t spelled out for me, but I presumed that the elder worked with a Politburo-authorized artistic licence and orders to airbrush a thousand formerly famous men out of photographs when they had made the mistake of walking into the political wind. “He work until seventy-four years, very old, and die,” Prokorov said. “Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, many powerful, yes?”
I nodded and checked the time on my phone. I would have settled for silence until he handed me the bill but he kept on. He told me he and his father stayed in the business in their own ways, his father with work in government offices with headshots for simple documents.
“My day, go Hollywood, make movies like Die Hard,” The Minimum-Wage Auteur said. He smiled and handed me a bag that contained the photo of a kid who had been bound for L.A. but died too easy.
5
My newfound friend was probably having his lunch and streaming The Sixth Sense when I stood at the Belovs’ door.
Vladimir Belov answered the door. He didn’t know how to say “Please come in” in English and I suspected he didn’t know how in Russian, either. Vlad would have left me in the hall if he hadn’t seen that I had something gift-wrapped under my arm. He stepped back and waved me in when Olga said his name and nothing more.
I wanted to keep it simple and direct. I was running late. Without Arzhanov or Ivan to guide me, I had managed to make a wrong turn and take a wrong train.
“From the team,” I said.
I handed Olga the gift-wrapped package. She held it, careful that her cigarette didn’t burn the plain red wrapping paper that Prokorov had dug up for me. She dipped her head and said “thank you.” Her voice rose no higher than a whisper, but she formed the words perfectly. I would find out soon that, in much better times, she had thousands of hours of practice at the start and end of her shift at work.
She opened the envelope with the card. I suspected she was able to make out Sorry for your loss. Then she opened the package: the image of Sergei posed on the ice in the Metallurg uniform. The team’s colours were the same as the Russian flag’s, the same not-bright red, not-rich blue, and not-shiny white. He had stood on the ice in front of the photographer at the end of practice without bothering to towel off or clean up. His damp black hair fell unevenly across his forehead and shot out at the sides and on top.
Olga was holding the photograph and staring into the eyes of a kid whose eyelids had been pulled shut by a mortician.
“If there’s anything I can do, please let me know,” I said. She stifled ninety-five percent of a whimper. Vlad was sitting on the couch, feet spread wide, head hanging, like a beaten fighter in the corner on his stool before the last round.
I looked around the room. I looked for cards and flowers. I saw nothing from Metallurg, nothing from anyone else. The three Belovs had been alone. The two were now even more so.
“You don’t believe me,” she said. Her words were clear as a bell and without any appeal or anger, just a simple statement of fact.
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I must have said something like “about what?” but I’m not sure what I managed to stammer.
She struggled to find words. She was out of practice in English. “You don’t believe me…that he was killed…he is young, twenty…Twenty they don’t die…Sergei does not die, I know this…he is strong, healthy. We have nothing. My job with Aeroflot is now gone. My sister is nurse. We always see doctor. Sergei always see doctor. See doctor three months before. See doctor for Metallurg after. They say Sergei is good. Now they will not look after he dies. It is not the Russian way. The dead go with the dead. The living go on, you know this?”
I knew. Socrates despaired about the unexamined life. Russians accept the uninvestigated death. It took them eighty years and how many regime changes to find and dig up the last Czar’s body and ten more years and maybe one final regime change to launch an investigation into his murder. So far, no arrests. Even though millions watched Sergei Belov die, authorities would feel no pressure to investigate. Millions watched and saw what had happened. No mystery, they’d have reasoned. All that was left was to bury the dead and forget.
Olga went on. Vlad raised his head and even though he didn’t know what she was saying, it was clear that he wanted her to stop. He didn’t have the energy to speak to her. She made a point of looking at me and not at him. “He is just one boy. He is no one’s, only ours. We must find out truth. We must get…”
Here she and her vocabulary reached an end. She went to a box of books in the bottom of a small closet and dug out a Russian-English dictionary. She had studied from it when she was working and had passed it on to Sergei when he went to Saint John. She flipped pages, pointed to a word, and then showed it to me.
“Justice,” I read.
It still looked like a sudden death in a game, I thought, an awful thing but something that has happened before and will again. Somewhere, it might be Moscow or Malmo or Montreal or Minnetonka, another kid will die and a pathologist will determine a cause and make a link to an undiagnosed condition. What’s the difference between diagnosing an oversized heart too late and just putting death down as destiny?
The needle had moved into the red on my helplessness meter and I looked to take my leave. But I didn’t. A tear rolled down her cheek. Over on the couch Vlad stared at his shoes and all the way through the floor to the basement.
Resignation would have been easy.
Some things are unanswerable. Why does a kid have to die?
Some places are unnavigable. Where can you go to get an answer in a Russian bureaucracy that still pays homage to national fortress traditions?
Some people are unreachable or unaccountable. Who would you go to? How could you get them to spill the whole truth?
This was what I had found, where I had found it, and why I shouldn’t have had hope to find anything more.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said against all reason.
Olga translated for Vlad. The Belovs’ expressions didn’t change. They had to think it was an empty promise. It wasn’t. I’d try, but I knew enough not to guarantee results.
6
I followed the breadcrumbs back to the subway and consulted the map of the Metro that the concierge had given me. I tucked it away on the platform and stepped onto a crowded car. I looked at my fellow passengers. They pointed their gazes down at the filthy floor or straight ahead with heads stock-still. Mannequins would have taken in more through painted-on eyes.
As the train sped down the line, I made a mental note: call the two Russian veterans on our roster in L.A, Azarov and Zhukov, or A & Zee. They’d made about $20 million each across the span of their careers. A & Zee were on deals at three mil and three-point-seven-five respectively that season, so they could come across with some cash to help the Belovs cover the cost of a funeral. They could put in calls to comrades around the league and get their agents to set up an online auction of memorabilia. Another mental note: call the coach in Saint John, Rocky Kerwin. Belov had been a fan favourite in his one year in the Q, not even twelve months before, so maybe he could pass the hat. My real hope was that the hat would pass through the hands of the Frozen Foods Magnate who owns the team. I am Ever The Dreamer.
This was the best I could do. I figured it was better than nothing, still not enough to feel like I delivered on my promise.
The visit to the Belovs was The One Down. I dreaded The One To Go: the long walk across the warzone that was the lawn of the Dubinin homestead. I would have to get the concierge to hire a car to drive out to the gated community in the exurb where Dubinin had lived. I’d given up on Arzhanov ever showing again. Maybe he had been working on a pay-as-you-go basis for a guy who went and was never coming back. Maybe he had been doing a favour that was never going to be repaid. Either way, I figured, I had seen the last of him.
The car and driver were going to cost the team more than two hundred bucks, and I’d hear about it from Hunts and the travel secretary in the audit. My defence was airtight. One: Even gouged for the ride, the team was dollar-for-dollar ahead in the game with Dubinin’s salary and expenses off the books. Two: The Future of the Franchise was riding on this mission. I was nominally heading out to pay respects, but my real intent was fishing for dope that might point me in the general direction of Dmitrov. I planned on gently pumping the grieving widow for any information about her late husband’s stealth trips to Magnitogorsk. Or the identity or identities of those who had benefited from his work more than I had. Dubinin had probably kept her in the dark about some things but not everything. Those who game the system take pride in their triumphs over an orderly world but that’s not enough by itself: they can only enjoy their triumphs by flattering themselves in front of audiences. Without that, what’s the point of being so smart? If Dubinin didn’t tell his wife, his captive audience, then maybe she could point me in the direction of someone he shared it with.
7
What would you have said to a widow whose husband had ended up splashed across the windows of the living room she was sitting in? Yeah, I couldn’t think of anything either. With plenty of warning and no plan going in, I stood at the front door and said: “I’m Brad Shade. Vlad works for our team. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She welcomed me in. Well, she welcomed me if you call leaving a door open, turning her back on me, and walking away wordlessly any sort of welcome. I followed her into the living room. She didn’t make any eye contact and her expression didn’t change as she lit a cigarette. The room stayed dead silent until she exhaled. “What team?” the tall, sturdy woman said. Any hope of knowledge into her husband’s hockey affairs went up in that heavily accented puff of smoke.
“Los Angeles,” I said, unable to dig myself a hole to crawl into and pull a cover over.
A silence that lasted three drags of a cigarette followed.
“American team,” she said. She wasn’t impressed. She flicked ashes into an overflowing ashtray.
The room became chilly, so much that I couldn’t defrost a promise that I had intended to make: the not-quite-half-heartfelt vow to do anything I could to help. I tried to reset the thermostat.
Mrs. Dubininova had picked up some English when Dubinin was playing in the league—I had read stories about her staying behind in L.A. to coach a junior-college volleyball team when her hub was dealt to St. Louis and didn’t blame her. I figured she had to be out of practice, so I kept the words simple.
“Have they…”
I stopped and pointed out the window at the men in uniforms on her lawn and the sidewalk of the cul-de-sac.
“…found anything?”
She couldn’t have held them in lower regard if they had been Americans.
One drag: “They no find.”
Second drag: “They no look.”
I had wondered about that walking up to the door. The yellow tape wrapped the scene as you’d expect in an investigation, but the crew inside it looked neither equipped nor inclined to do a forensic work-up. They wore bulletproof vests not lab coats, packed holstered heaters not magnifying glasses, stood watch outside the perimeter of the tape rather than combing every inch inside it. They wore boots covered in slush and mud, not the outfits that would have prevented contamination from investigators’ DNA. The widow Dubinin seemed to have grounds for dismissal of their detective work, but then again I had no idea of what work had already been done.
“Here they say they look when they don’t. When they say they don’t they watching.”
She didn’t tell me whether that was an old Russian saying or just a fact of life. She didn’t seem emotionally invested enough to be paranoid even if I was.
She had to have been a good-looking woman in her time to be courted by a member of the old Soviet elite. I found out later that she had a golden bloodline to match Dubinin’s. Her father had been a Dynamo hockey star who had won Olympic gold in ’56. In fact, her long-time captaincy of the national squad and her father’s fame had put her in the conversation when the brass had discussed the carrier of the flag on the Olympic team’s march in the 1988 opening ceremonies. She had gone back to the Olympics three times as an assistant coach with the national team. Still, a few photos and mementoes from her late husband’s days with the Soviets and Dynamo lined the shelves of a bookcase in the living room, but any evidence of her own career were conspicuously absent.
Dubinin had maintained an athletic bearing and when travelling he was a morning regular in the hotel gyms, but his wife’s athleticism and looks had faded. I saw it on the streets of Moscow: so many stunning young women but rarely, almost never, any over the age of forty. Whether it’s hard living, hard climate, or something genetic, time is the enemy of the Russian frau. Later it would occur to me that Dubininova’s eroded good looks were a good reason not to showcase images of her former athletic glories.
Inside of a couple of minutes, our conversation had ground to a dead-cold stop. I just had to warm up the room with the most reliable source of persuasive heat: radiant dollar bills. Or in this case, rubles.
“We have a death benefit in our contracts with our workers,” I told her. “We have your information to pay you. It’s not much but it’s something. If your husband was killed because of his work for our team, there’s indemnity there…”
I could see she struggled with that one.
“Twice the money,” I explained.
She nodded. Understood if not fully believed nor slightly appreciated. I had to stick to a basic vocabulary and brief thoughts that allowed her to translate in her head.
“If you can show me the bills…the records, paper…from the last couple of months…that would help,” I said. “I need the computer the team gave him.”
“You can have things,” she said. “I not interested.”
So it seemed, at least about everything except the money.
She walked me up the stairs and into her late husband’s office. Above Dubinin’s desk he had hung two sweaters, one with the D for Dynamo, the other the familiar CCCP, hermetically preserved under glass along with brass plates with his name and years and career stats engraved in Cyrillic characters. Nothing from L.A. Scouts are whores for freebies from their employers—the team jackets, the clipboards, hats, whatever—but Dubinin had none in plain view, not even a ballpoint pen with our logo.
One framed photo was standing on the heavy oak desk in a place of prominence: a shot of Dubinin in a martial arts gi bound by a well-weathered black belt. In his right hand he was holding aloft a trophy, all of thirty pounds of silverware. He had his left arm halfway up and around the shoulder of a similarly robed warrior. Halfway was as far as Dubinin’s arm would go. His playmate was a head taller than him. He was a superheavyweight, maybe a super-superheavyweight. His facial features fused Slavic and Asian, so I suspected that he hailed from one of the eastern republics closer to Beijing than Moscow. I didn’t recognize the gi from my time kicking around dojos and I had seen a few, having trained to my first dan in karate and my brown in judo. The gi wasn’t cut for karate. Wasn’t heavy enough for judo. No Korean script that advertises tae kwon do. I had never heard Dubinin talk about the martial arts, likely because he had thought we were all beneath his belt. I thought mine was as black as his, but I wouldn’t want to fuck with his dance partner.
The light was off but sunlight poured through a window that looked out onto the backyard where I could see a sapling peeking through three feet of snow. None of that sapling’s forebears had been sacrificed on Dubinin’s account. He kept a virtually paperless office. All his bookkeeping, at least with regard to our club, was kept on his team-issued computer and said unit wasn’t on his desk. His laptop bag with the L.A. crest was nowhere to be seen.
I pointed out to the front lawn where the boys guarded the scene of the crime. “They come to look here, take things away?” I asked Mrs. D.
“They do not come. Nothing to take.”
All the desk drawers were unlocked but virtually empty. I rifled through the one thin folder I found, seventy or eighty pages, all of it in Russian except for three forms from the team’s HR department and a hotel reservation for the draft in June.
“Nobody else comes here to look?”
She shook her head and gave me a dirty, impatient look. “Who care?”
I put the papers back in the folder and she didn’t seem to care that I was taking them.
“You know he worked for other people too. Teams, agents, maybe players,” I said matter-of-factly. You can’t libel the dead.
“Yes,” she said. She made it seem to be no big revelation.
No harm asking if he had any reason for a particular road trip. “I talked to someone he worked for with Magnitogorsk. How long did he work for them?”
She didn’t bite.
“No,” she said. “This a team he not like. He worked for many. You say this. But he always say that he worked for no one, only he worked for…”
She made a big fist out of her oversized hands, extended her thumb and punched it just below her collarbone. Yeah, I expected no different. Dubinin looked after No. 1 and would have had no compunction about telling her about it. That went a long way to explain why any pain on her husband’s explosive demise was trumped by a pre-existing resentment.
I was doing a quick scan of his office when I felt nature calling. Last night’s booze and this morning’s coffee were catching up to me. I’m sure there are ways to gracefully ask a widow to use the facilities but I couldn’t come up with one that Mrs. D would understand. I pointed to the second-floor bathroom and then myself. She nodded with disgust.
Once behind the closed door, I made a quick inspection and identified this as the master’s sandbox: all his grooming stuff, none of hers. I unzipped, did my business, and rezipped, but while I was washing my hands I sneezed and my sinuses filled. I grabbed a Kleenex from the box on the counter and blew my nose. I went to toss my tissue in the small, plain white trash container beneath the sink and saw a single item in it: an empty vial with a label in what wasn’t Russian or English and looked to be German. It didn’t seem to have a dispenser’s name on it, no address or phone number. I pocketed it. I opened the bathroom cabinet before exiting. Four shelves. Aftershaves, colognes, and other stuff I never used lined the bottom shelf, vitamins, amino acids, blue-green algae the shelf above that. The top two decks were conspicuously empty.
