The third man in, p.11
The Third Man In, page 11
I shut the door behind me. She was waiting, making sure that I was leaving empty-handed. She didn’t bother frisking me, which was a good thing.
“Did he say anything to you? Was he worried?”
“He never say anything,” she said. “He is always same.”
Going gently was getting me nowhere. I figured I might as well take my big cut. “Who would want him dead?”
She said nothing. Maybe the Russian constitution grants its citizens the right to refuse self-incrimination.
8
I opened the back passenger-side door and ducked my head inside, ready to apologize to the driver for taking so much time. I didn’t have to bother. I looked at the driver, his features charcoaled by a five o’clock shadow. He was doing a little talking and a lot of listening on his Bluetooth. He could have been fielding a call from someone who was happy to see the last of Dubinin or would be happy to see the last of me. I coughed. I coughed again. On Overly Throaty Hack No. 3, I had his attention.
As we pulled away and started back to the Marriott, I took a last look at the Dubinin home through the rear window. Something just didn’t seem right. The police had taped off the lawn, the driveway, and a section of the sidewalk in front of the house and twenty yards in each direction from Ground Zero. Even through hungover eyes I could see glass, metal, rubber, leather upholstery, and what looked like a lesser cut of meat another twenty yards beyond the tape and littered on other people’s lawns and on the street. And the five men there were standing straight upright, one lighting up a dart, its ash dropping in the snow. No crime scene photography. No one picking up shards that might give any clue to the explosive device used. No one was even bent over at the waist. And there was shit everywhere, on lawns and even roofs of houses outside the taped-off area. The site looked unmolested by curious minds. The Detectives In Name Only couldn’t have filled a single baggie with the forensic evidence they had collected. The woman tearlessly mourning inside the house had it right: those dispatched to the scene were staging a Potemkin investigation.
I looked back through the rear window and caught a glance of a tow truck raising the back end of a black car, a boxy Russian-made economy model, that had been parked three houses down on the opposite side of the wide street from Dubinin’s. It might have been scratched by a chunk of metal or hit by a gold cufflink at a bullet’s speed but otherwise emerged undamaged by the explosion. Looked to be in good working order, all glass and rubber intact. It had just been left in a no-parking zone. The odds were against it getting towed for double-parking. Moscow drivers don’t give a damn about the rules when it comes to cars, whether they’re moving or at rest, and illegally parked rides outnumber those in approved spaces. The cops assigned to ticketing them are overwhelmed. Some poor schlub’s luck, the cops left stones unturned on murder but had zero tolerance on double-parking.
As the driver pulled out onto an eight-lane highway, I mulled over a conversation I had with Dubinin at our team’s meetings months back before the draft where we selected Dmitrov and Belov. I had shown up early in our offices and gone to the conference room. I set up an erasable board. I dropped hard copies of the organization’s depth chart, summaries of player contracts, and free-agent lists in front of each chair at the table. If everyone’s working from the same script, the same information, no one feels marginalized: that’s the way Grant Tomlin laid it out to me, a little something that he picked up out of the Harvard Business Journal or one of those other publications he never gets around to reading in full but always makes sure he’s seen carrying, especially when our owner, Galvin, is around.
I had called Dubinin and told him to come a half-hour early, while I was still setting up for a meeting that would last over eight hours. I could have called him in an hour early if I had planned on it being a dialogue, but I intended to do most of the talking. I sent one of the office interns to pick him up at the hotel, just so there wouldn’t be any dicking around. I wanted his read on Dmitrov and, somewhat, on Belov. I wanted to know the status of their contracts with Magnitogorsk, the exact temperature of the hot coals we would have to walk barefoot across to get them to North America. All I was asking Dubinin for was the dope he was being well paid to collect.
Dubinin showed up ten minutes late. He had been booking a spa appointment when the intern had found him at the hotel. He had gone native and fully embraced the Hollywood tribe. He had picked up a shirt at Louis Vuitton, a number in pink silk, and was wearing it unbuttoned halfway down his chest. I was both relieved and appalled that he shaved it. He probably figured that a bare and tanned canvas provided a better backdrop for the thick gold chain draped around his neck.
I wanted to blast him but there wasn’t enough time. I stuck to the business at hand.
“Tell me why we should take the two kids,” I said.
Dubinin told me only why we shouldn’t. “One is a good player, but not great, not what people think. One doesn’t play not at all, I think.”
I pulled out my list. We owned the twenty-second pick in the draft.
“Here’s twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two,” I said. I ran a highlighter through three names on my list: Paulsen, a skilled but small defenceman out of Spokane; Dupont, a centre with Drummondville, a kid who stood 6’4” but skated like he had a bag of cement on his back; and Lindstrom, a forward out of Mankato, an earnest but unexciting kid who had missed most of the season with a torn-up shoulder. “I have a hard time projecting them as second-line players,” I said. “Dmitrov at least has a chance to be a first-liner. These other kids are projects and guesses. I wouldn’t say that about Dmitrov. For all I know, he has a chance to be an all-star in this league. There are only two other kids in this draft that you could say that about and they’re going one and two.”
“One, two, these are Canadian, American players, you know them better. I know the Russians. Not Dmitrov or Belov for you.”
You. Never us. I did the slow burn. I would have told him that I planned to take Dmitrov at No. 22, but I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Five minutes after he walked out of the room he’d be texting other Russian scouts and God Knows Who with the breaking news.
“There are others you can take,” he said, seeming pleased with himself while patronizing me. “Other Russian players if you want.”
“I don’t want the other ones, just those two. Can you do it? Can you get their releases and get them signed?”
“My friend, there are things you can want and things you can have,” he said.
My friend pushed my button. Every time.
I wanted the 411 on the kids, but I came away with nothing except the feeling that Dubinin was on his own fact-finding mission.
Most businesses run on efficiencies and production but a scouting department is usually not one of them. A lot of organizations keep scouts on the payroll out of habit. A scout’s performance can’t be reviewed on a year-to-year basis. You can only authoritatively evaluate his ratings of players after five years have passed, a fair amount of time for kids to grow into their games. When scouts’ contracts expire on July 1 a general manager has free agents to worry about, veterans he needs to re-sign, entry-level contracts to negotiate with the agents of kids picked up in the draft, and, drum roll, a scouting staff to either assemble or keep in place. One guess which among them represents the smallest financial outlay and thus shifts to the bottom of the agenda. I remember June 30th clearly. Just about the height of the business season with a bunch of veterans about to become free agents on the stroke of midnight eastern, 9 P.M. in L.A. After lunch I buttonholed Hunts and then asked about letting Dubinin go. Didn’t float it, asked point-blank for the authority to talk to another Russian guy I had in mind, older guy that Duke Avildsen recommended. I made my best possible argument. Hunts gave me the distracted Yeah Yeah Let’s Talk About It and took a call from an agent, shutting the door behind him and in my face. The next day, Hunts’s secretary dropped on my desk what her fax had spat out when she reported for work that morning: Dubinin’s signed two-year deal.
9
My phone rang: Call display registered an unknown number. I was a motivated answerer and took it on the first ring. With hope and not much else to help me in the search for Dmitrov, I couldn’t afford to screen calls. Dmitrov might even have dialled the number for all I knew. For a second I allowed myself to imagine the dream scenario: Dmitrov walking away from the team and into the arms of a young puck bunny who wanted him to take her to L.A., where all of us could live happily ever after.
Nothing was going to come that easy.
“Mr. Shade, my name is Lee Siddon. I’m a reporter with CNN.”
Her voice modulated perfectly. She hit it in one take.
“I’m familiar with your work,” I said. CNN and BBC were usually the only two English-language channels available in hotels on scouting swings in Europe. I must have seen her a few times but I remembered her voice, throaty, almost hoarse, the Lorraine Bracco in CNN’s pool of correspondents. I always wondered if it had been the cold, vodka, or cigarettes that had thickened her vocal chords. Her voice had been so much deeper than Edward Snowden’s.
I got along with the media in my playing days. When I started out in L.A., a couple of the reporters told me I’d have a shot at landing a spot on air when I hung up the blades. My marriage to a sitcom star voted as Best Newcomer at the People’s Choice Awards might have had something to do with the reporters’ high opinion of my marketability. Really, though, the reporters who buttered me up like a family bag of popcorn were snooping around for some inside juice on a trade to bring a name goaltender to L.A., a rumour being whispered about. A media type’s relationship with any subject with a three-digit IQ boils down to quid pro quo. In this case, I told the reporters nothing, though I knew the deal was pronounced dead a couple of days before. If you’re in the media, you better come equipped with a quid better than rote flattery if you want my quo.
Since going back to L.A. as a scout, I try to keep my dealings with reporters to a minimum and refer any requests to Hunts and the suits back in our head offices. I have a hard time imagining what quid they could come across with that might help me do my job and give me any sort of advantage. And in the information business, inside dope being my stock-in-trade, I could count on all the quo they were looking for blowing up in my face like a joke-shop cigar. Instead of waiting for their lame offers, I take the initiative. If you can play a reporter, you can beat them to the punch because they’re always going to try to play you. I resort to the surest way to play anyone in the media: deep-tissue ego massage.
Lee Siddon didn’t seem to impress easily. Neither did she seem too self-impressed. I guess sportswriters belong to a different class than reporters who lob questions at heads of state. Lee Siddon had sat across from Putin and, with the camera rolling and the world watching, tried to walk up to the line and then an inch beyond the Official Message.
I didn’t ask her how she got my number. The flight, the night, and the fight had worn me out and I felt like hell, definitely not on top of my game. Not that it really mattered.
“I’m sure you know why I’m calling,” she said. “It’s with regard to a story about Vladimir Dubinin that we’re working on.”
“Yeah, I just walked out the last door ol’ Vlad ever opened and shut,” I said.
I was going for shock value. As soon as I said it, though, I realized that, however smartass I was trying to be, the front door of the man’s castle would have been only the penultimate that he had opened and closed in the sequence as we knew it. The driver’s side door to the loaner would have been dead last.
Lee Siddon didn’t rattle. She wasn’t just another pretty mike-stand. She knew what she wanted and needed and didn’t have time to waste.
“I wonder if you could help me…if I could ask you a couple of questions in front of a camera. It would probably be five minutes, no more. I just want our viewers to get an idea of who Mr. Dubinin was, what his work entailed…”
Who Mr. Dubinin was: others could have spoken to that better than me, including the woman inside the house I just departed. What his work entailed: I knew what his work for me was supposed to entail but I couldn’t tell whose water he was really carrying. An exposé into Dubinin’s life and death would detail how he drew a paycheque from our team but managed to be in the pocket of myriad others. It might have made for an intriguing feature for Lee Siddon’s viewers, but too intriguing for the only viewer who mattered to me, namely, the owner of our franchise. Galvin would come away with the opinion that Dubinin’s double agency reflected poorly on his franchise, his pass into L.A.’s society pages. If that exposé aired, CNN could air another feature the next week with Hunts and me in lead roles: Faces of America’s Unemployed.
It sounded like Lee Siddon wanted a hell of a lot more than five minutes. I knew she was underselling it and then, surprise, she’d spring the There Is So Much More Here Than I Knew. Or maybe it would be This Is So Fascinating, the ultimate f-bomb that reporters from People and Variety used to lob at the X and me. I heard umpteen explanations why an interview booked for five minutes morphed into an aimless forty-five-minute fishing expedition.
I weighed what I could say versus what I might come away with. Maybe my quid and personal charm could induce her to loan me CNN’s fixer and translator, maybe set me up with a contact in the U.S. Embassy who could fast-track Dmitrov’s papers to get his ass on a flight pronto.
“I’m going to be at Luzhniki Arena tonight for a game,” I said. “I’ll be at the front doors at six,” I said.
And it was done.
I looked out the back window. Traffic was too heavy on the eight lanes into the city to tell if we were being followed and way too heavy to do anything about it. The driver was aggressive to the point of reckless and he looked ready to trade paint for a car length’s advantage. “Shit, take it easy,” I told him but he had earpieces in and he was deep in conversation.
I sank in the back seat and tried to assess what I had landed myself in by agreeing to meet CNN’s High Heels on the Ground in Moscow. I have made a lot of questionable decisions in my life and a few downright brutal calls. I had my doubts about this one.
10
“What do you mean you don’t know where Dmitrov is?”
Hunts’s hair was on fire. I knew it would be when I had called him from the hotel. Off the top he had asked me if any cause had been given in Belov’s death: nyet. He had asked me if I had any news on the bombing: nyet again. He had still seemed appropriately blindsided by the deaths of a kid on our negotiation list and a scout on our staff. That said, he moved on from an Irretrievable Past to the Hopefully Foreseeable Future, Dmitrov. And that Hopefully Foreseeable Future was contingent on a lot of things falling into place. The first: I needed to talk to Dmitrov, face to face. I hadn’t even seen him at a distance.
“What do you mean you don’t know where he is?” he said again, turning the volume up.
“Just that. I don’t know. Metallurg doesn’t know. Did Dubinin know? Did whoever blew Dubinin to smithereens know? I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” Hunts said. Static and echo on a cellphone call across twelve time zones did nothing to filter out the High Withering in his delivery. I don’t mind him talking to me as a friend or as a boss because he is both, but I didn’t like him talking to me like an incompetent or a child because I’m neither.
“I’m going through Dubinin’s records as much as I can,” I said.
“Good luck with that.”
“I appreciate your best wishes but I didn’t call for them. I called because I need your help. I need you to get ahold of the travel secretary and the accounting department. I need everything we have on Dubinin. Expense accounts, charges on his corporate card, everything.”
“You going to solve his murder, Sherlock? Leave it to the KGB. Moscow’s Finest. Whoever does that shit over there.”
“I don’t give a shit who killed him so long as he or they don’t have me on the to-do list. I’m just looking for anything that can point me in Dmitrov’s direction. Frequently called phone numbers would be a start.”
“So you want to know if Dubinin lied about his mileage or ordered room service or something. You do know it’s only your ass on the line and mine if we lose this kid, right?”
“Yeah, that’s a big 10-4, buddy. I told you what I need. It’s not what I want. It’s what I need.”
“And you think all that shit’s gonna tell you where Dmitrov is?”
“It might, it might not. Until I know that it doesn’t, I’m leaning with might.”
His sigh carried all the way from the other side of the planet. I cut in before he could get off his next dig at me.
“And I want this stuff now,” I said.
“I know there’s a time difference but it’s a weekend here and the middle of the night. And you do know that I’m at the GMs’ meetings, right? I can’t just walk down the hall or anything.”
“Fine, you want to wait until Monday for me to start looking for the Golden Child with the Mad Bomber wandering around.”
“Okay, I’ll call them up and get them into the office. I’ll tell them it’s an administrative emergency.”
“That’s not a lie,” I said. “I mean, it is murder and a missing-persons deal we’re talking about.”
