The third man in, p.12
The Third Man In, page 12
“Shadow, you work for me, I mean, after all, I hired you, right? So howzit I feel like your Girl Friday?”
11
“He had worked for our organization for eight years,” I said. I left it at that, even though Lee Siddon nodded her pretty little head as if to give me her consent to go on. I didn’t feel expansive about Dubinin. I wanted to apologize to her. I could have told her I was Bad TV.
She was standing across from me while her soundman held a furry-socked boom over my noggin. She tilted her head minutely. She raised her eyebrows a combined sixteenth of an inch. She mastered all the subtle cues for pumping details out of interview targets who felt like they didn’t have a story to tell, like me, or weren’t inclined to tell it, also like me. Her mastery didn’t matter to me. She wanted me to talk about tragic loss and the boys in production could lay down the string section and jerk tears. I wasn’t up for it. I’m a practiced liar but I’d have been an unenthusiastic one if I gave her what she was fishing for. If she wanted me to talk about “tragic loss,” I’d be talking about Belov, but the kid’s story would end up on the cutting-room floor.
Lee Siddon pressed me for more. I could only tell her that I had spoken to his widow and was trying to chase down his confederates to figure out what happened, though I didn’t bother to say that I had no idea who his BFFs might be. When I mentioned the widow, Lee Siddon thought she might have that Much-Needed Human Moment. No such luck. She prodded me but I couldn’t say that I had consoled Madame Dubininova, couldn’t say that she had wept on my shoulder, couldn’t say that her family and friends had gathered around her. I couldn’t even say that she mourned him.
A crowd milled behind me, another behind the camera. Some were banner-carrying fans, some rubbernecking passers-by. I wasn’t concerned about them. Others were professional watchers whose presence around CNN’s cameras was a coincidence that recurred daily. I couldn’t get the idea of being under surveillance out of my mind, but the professional detail assigned to her had become just part of the scenery to Lee Siddon. The cameraman and soundman were Russians and they doubled as the network’s fixers, though I supposed that they did some fixing for the boys in the Kremlin’s intelligence division who wanted to monitor the foreign media.
A drunk stumbled into the frame and waved an almost-empty bottle.
“Cut,” the director yelled.
Lee Siddon heaved a sigh and her breasts rose and fell. She moved the clip-on mike on her coat, a designer number unbuttoned just enough that it hid the selected details but still revealed the story. I knew a bit of the story going in. According to Wikipedia, which I had checked before going to the arena, she was forty-four, although you wouldn’t know it from the photos online. She had a rack that nine out of ten starlets would like to upgrade to. One shot from the top line on Google Images showed her running in a 10k race in Moscow, where she finished in the top ten in her age group. If she had been less than a C-cup, I suspect that she would have landed on the podium.
She and I made small talk while the soundman screwed around with the levels and the director peeked at playback. The cameraman tried to move the crowd back and the fans complied, although the spooks assigned to the CNN crew didn’t budge.
“I looked you up,” I said. “You’re from Toronto too. I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“I had to learn how to say about,” she said in passable American. “I haven’t lived in Canada for a long time.”
“I always thought it was weird how there are so many Canadians doing the news in the States,” I said, not exactly a scintillating observation but I didn’t want the conversation to stall or drift back to Dubinin until the camera started rolling again. She wasn’t impressed.
“If you took the Canadians off CNN it would a twelve-hour news network,” she said.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” the director said. She ran her fingers through her hair. I snapped to attention.
“In three…two…one,” the director said. The professional watchers had seen it all before and flipped their switches in tandem.
“How did you hear about this?”
I gathered my thoughts. I raised my gaze from her breasts up to her eyes.
“Like everyone else, from television, Russian news coverage,” I said.
Another clip destined for the cutting-room floor. I wasn’t trying to be unhelpful. It was just my nature. She pressed ahead and asked me about a bit of fantasy making the rounds on RT, the Kremlin-controlled television network.
“Reports in the Russian media are that other teams in your league wanted players whose rights are owned by Los Angeles and that Dubinin was caught in the crossfire,” she said. “Could there be any truth to that?”
Leave it to the KHL to spin Dubinin’s death into a smear of our league.
“Any truth in that you’d find in the first half of that proposition,” I said. “I can guarantee that other teams in our league are very interested in Maxim Dmitrov, one of our draft choices. So is every team in the KHL. I can guarantee that. What I can tell you is that Los Angeles wants him and doesn’t have him at this point. Killing our scout here doesn’t help other teams in North America get him. The idea that anyone from our league would be involved in the murder of a guy working for another team…that’s science fiction. Not a grain of truth in it.”
Lee Siddon had her clip. I sounded angry and I was. I didn’t like the insinuation that our league is more ruthless than it really is. We’ve got image problems we deserve, more already than we need.
If Dubinin had thought his life was at risk, if he had an idea that a bomb was waiting out there or maybe a radioactive poison dart or maybe something more exotic, it would have explained his less-than-wholehearted effort to get Dmitrov to L.A. He would have been the last guy to get caught in the crossfire.
Lee Siddon threw a follow-up at me. “Critics here say that young Russians going to the United States to play hockey is like a form of human trafficking,” she said. “How would you describe that?”
“With due respect, it’s fuckin’ bullshit,” I said.
Lee Siddon glanced at the producer. He gave the Universal Sign of Keep Rolling & We’ll Bleep It in Editing.
“If it was anything like that, I would never have got into the business,” I said.
I could have stopped there, but I was too wound up. It wouldn’t make it to air, though it was an earful for the professional watchers.
“I mean, human trafficking is usually young people bought and sold into the sex trade,” I said. “They’re innocents, slaves. It’s unconscionable. They’re blameless and powerless…the worst type of exploitation. If the league is supposedly engaging in human trafficking, it’s the supposed traffickers who’re exploited. The scouts and executives from our league are down on bended knees trying to get the top prospects to come over. Our teams make accommodations for the young Russians they wouldn’t stand for from Canadian or American kids. The suggestion that they are treated unfairly is bullshit…”
Lee Siddon looked over at the director again. He was rolling his eyes, saying Enough Already.
“It’s like talking about trafficking drugs and saying that the drugs were being exploited. The ‘humans trafficked’ here stand to make millions. Yeah, I mean, you can make comparisons to the sex trade…these eighteen-year-old kids are only too ready to whore themselves out and take your wallet from the bedside table.”
I carried on but not for much longer. We had strayed an awful long way from Dubinin’s murder.
I estimated that the interview went no better than poorly. I didn’t want to take a pass because I’m old-fashioned, just like good manners and animal attraction. It’s cowardly to hide behind No Comment, classless not to keep an appointment, and ridiculous not to meet a hot woman at least halfway.
This hot woman took out a business card and wrote down the name of a bar for ex-pats. She told me she was going there after she cut her story and it landed in Atlanta with a push of the send button. That was where I was going to be heading when the game was heading into its last minute. If she had her own send button I was going to try to push it.
12
“I played here back in 2001,” I told her.
“When in 2001?”
“Came in late August, gone by November.”
“We just missed each other, I was here from the October of ’99 through to April of 2001. Our Moscow correspondent was on medical leave. I had just signed on with the network.”
“Too bad, I could have used company back then,” I said. Okay, I hadn’t wanted for company back then but I was positioning myself for company in the very near future, just as she was.
“I hear you,” she said.
“That would have been a wild time to have been here at your end.” I didn’t speak with any authority on that count. I was just fishing, just guessing.
I probably knew a little more about Russia than the average guy and not just because I had played with Spartak. My second or third year in the league, I took a Soviet-era course finishing my degree by correspondence and the readings ended with Gorby just like the Soviet era did. I still stayed in the loop. Which is to say that I followed it closely enough to know that Boris Yeltsin stepped down and Vladimir Putin took power in the stretch Lee Siddon was in Moscow.
She didn’t look back on it fondly and it didn’t make her a media star. Exactly the opposite.
“It wound up being a bad break. The correspondent in Moscow…do you know him? Jim Beachem?”
I did. I pictured him in the clip the network always replayed. Beachem standing in front of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, in a perfectly rumpled, green military vest with a dozen button-up pockets, though he probably used those pockets to save receipts to fill out his expense accounts.
“It was a tough time, tough act to follow,” she said.
She infused act with a toxic level of derision, but Beachem had always been the guy with the breathless report. If he had been an actor, he’d be the bit player who was chewing up the scenery.
“Interim is a pejorative in the business, kiss of death. I was a patch on a leaky tire as far as they were concerned in Atlanta. ‘In over her head.’ ”
She did air quotes, open and closed, with her index and middle finger.
“It looked like it was going to be a great break for me. I’d been working for ABC affiliates in Buffalo and Detroit for a couple of years, just learning the business—you know, snowstorms and layoffs at the auto factories—but a suit in Atlanta liked my tape…”
I had the impression that she was setting up a rationalization of failures, not that she had detailed any yet. My impression was right.
“God I don’t know if you remember, the new millennium, Y2K, the apocalypse that wasn’t. I was telling Atlanta there was stuff bubbling here. They didn’t want to know. They didn’t get it. They thought the conspiracy theories about the apocalypse were the news and what I was giving them…”
My cue. “…was a conspiracy theory from their interim reporter ‘over her head,’ ” I said, letting her know that I was paying attention.
“Yeah, Atlanta said that Beachem was going to be back soon, didn’t turn out that way at all. Cancer. Almost two full years. They said, in the meantime, look after human-interest stuff and chase anything that’s reported anywhere…the week before they had me do a piece for one of the business shows about Benetton opening its first store in the GUM department store and had me chasing a story in the Manchester Guardian about this tunnel rat, a guy who had spent more time underground than anyone on the planet. Story was that he had found a subway system exclusively for Kremlin and KGB workers. It had been an urban legend more than any sort of state secret. I had been telling Atlanta that there was a class of new political operatives and strategists getting ready for the election in a few months. They either didn’t believe me or didn’t think I was up to reporting it. ‘Jim will look after that,’ they said, didn’t know he was going to be in a hospital bed in Minnesota for another year.”
She took a big hit from her martini to try to get rid of a bad taste that had stayed in her mouth for more than a dozen years.
“You know, CNN did their ‘New Year’s around the World’ thing, fluffy as a down pillow. All the correspondents had to wait their turns. I told them that I had this news and the producer said we could put it on the scroll but that they weren’t coming to me until 11:58 Moscow time. And they didn’t. I’m standing there with news that shakes up Russia and as it ends up they hadn’t even put Yeltsin’s resignation on the scroll. I was reporting all this but in Atlanta they wanted shots of the fireworks shows. I was getting drowned out by Roman candles going off behind me on the remote.”
“Let me guess how this turns out—when the network misses the story, you take the fall,” I said. “It’s pinned on you and you’re eight time zones from Atlanta.”
“You have a future as a network news executive,” she said. “It’s dirtier than hockey.”
“Hockey is a merit-based system on the ice but all Kremlin off it,” I said and then walked over to the bar to pick up a couple of more drinks.
I bumped and jostled my way through the crowd and got the bartender’s attention over heads and shoulders. “Two martinis and the cheque,” I said. I made it to the only opening at the stand-up, one cleared by a fellow in one of the largest suits ever cut on Saville Row. He had a head shaved right down to the wood and owned a bulldog’s grill. He was as pasty as a freshly bathed coal miner. However fierce he looked, he was one hundred percent an Old-School Gentleman when he opened his mouth, like a guy who walked off the screen in one of those black-and-white films that came out of Shepperton back in the ’40s. He was impressively educated and I don’t impress easily: an Oxonian, in the middle of the scrum in epic battles against Cambridge, as it turned out.
“Excuse me, that’s a Canadian accent I detect, isn’t it,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. I left “so what?” unsaid.
I thought he looked familiar. Same with the guy beside him.
“Yes, my good friend here is a Canadian,” he said, turning and tapping a shoulder that belonged to a thin-shouldered guy wearing thick glasses and a suit from the same tailor, a suit more formal than necessary for the room and several times more formal than anything in my closet. “Murdoch, Murdoch Martyn, this is…I’m sorry, I didn’t get to your name yet.”
“Brad Shade.”
“Mr. Shade, Murdoch, and my name is Parry, Trevor Parry.”
“I’m technically a Canadian,” Martyn said. “My mother was born in far-off Ontario. Father was an engineer, Imperial Oil, roughed it in the wild, saw the world.”
I didn’t suppose that Dear Old Dad had to lift anything heavier than a slide rule and pitched his tent at the Royal York.
“What brings you to this Godforsaken Outpost, old man?” Trevor Parry said, expediting familiarity in a way that always gets me raising my guard.
“Hockey.”
“A player, then?” Martyn said.
“I was a player then, a scout now,” I said and their puzzled looks begged my explanation. “I span the globe and traipse through every ‘Godforsaken Outpost’ to find prospects for my team in L.A. to sign. Finding them is the easiest part. Signing them is a helluva lot harder.”
“Quite,” Parry said. “So it is with Russian wealth and treasure. Many challenges in that sort of ‘export business.’ A natural hostility, institutional opposition.”
Having spent what would have been a useful part of the evening explaining my business to Lee Siddon, I didn’t feel like doing it again with these two. This was turning into Career Day. The bartender didn’t seem to be racing to bring back my Amex. I looked back at the table where Lee was waiting.
“What brings you to Moscow?” I said, tired of shop talk.
“Love of the game, I suppose,” Parry said. “Our game. We work at the British Embassy.”
It registered: I had seen the mountain and molehill heading into the Anglican church beside the Courtyard. I suspected that they weren’t in Moscow just to stamp papers at the embassy, especially when I saw Parry wave at Lee Siddon and her waved reply.
The bartender made his return and studied me while I converted rubles to bucks and filled out the tip line. Parry continued to hold court and I only caught the chapter headings. One: “The Cold War Is Now All about Cold Hard Cash.” Another: “The Undertow in the Flow of Capital.” And another: “The Dream of a Clawback.” When I signed, Martyn fumbled his wallet out of his jacket and pulled out a business card, Union Jack, Her Majesty’s and All.
When I came back to our table, off in a dark corner in the back of the place, I toasted Lee Siddon. “You know them?” I asked.
“They’re here all the time,” she said. “Usually watching rugby or cricket or whatever passes for sports in their country. I’ve also dealt with them—not on air, just getting official statements—when the Russians were holding two British Embassy workers on suspicion of spying.”
“Was it just suspicion?” I asked.
“Everyone is under suspicion, rightly or wrongly I guess. That case was neither here nor there. The two of them were released, escorted to the airport…”
“And covered in glory when they got home,” I said.
“Something like that. Diplomats here know things could go sideways anytime. That’s how this country operates these days. They just count on not being taken too seriously.”
Off in our dark corner, she shot me the No Turning Back Look. She said she never had a third drink. “Life on call,” she said and laid her hand on my arm and left it there. I was ready to place that call.
By the time she drained her drink, she was confident enough that the Moscow night would stay quiet enough to invite me back to her place for more than enough.
13
We walked four blocks back to her digs. I tried to steer the conversation away from her work, which is always a lust killer. En route, I tried to make small talk about Russia, about Moscow. I was only sort of successful.
