The third man in, p.13
The Third Man In, page 13
“I didn’t recognize this place when I came back a couple of years ago, first time since 2001,” I said.
“A lot has changed since then,” she said. “A lot has changed since Atlanta sent me back here.”
“When was that?”
“Back in oh-eight,” she said. “I mean, a lot has changed. More money everywhere you look. Capitalism’s success, democracy’s failure. Politically, nothing has changed since the fireworks show in Red Square back in 2000. The faceless guy is installed in Yeltsin’s place, a KGB alum at the time when the KGB was shredded. Not that anyone is a former KGB man. Back in the ’90s, the filing cabinets were being unlocked and documents were the researchers’ for the asking. Then along comes Putin and where there used to be combination locks he’s putting on deadbolts or welding them shut.”
She rambled when she was nervous. “I go on about my work, don’t I?” she said.
“I don’t but my work interests me and nobody else. Let’s face it, my job’s not so important in grand scheme as yours,” I said.
“It has to be important enough to bomb your friend’s car.”
I wasn’t about to correct her on “friend.” I didn’t want to seem that cold-hearted about Dubinin’s death even if I was, but I didn’t want to seem worried about the guys who wired his car either. I hoped she wouldn’t bring it up. It was the mark of a good investigator and a good reporter: she did it without being too obvious about it and after a couple of martinis.
Lee tapped in her security code at the door and showed me in. The townhouse had been gifted to Ted Turner back when he broadcast the Goodwill Games in the ’80s, and in the decades since it served as the crib for CNN’s Moscow correspondents. It was relatively swell.
I picked up where I left off and she mixed us nightcaps.
“I remember, back when I was playing in Germany, the Russian hockey association’s president or vice-president got blown up in his car in the street,” I said.
“In the ’90s that would have been organized crime. Putin has cleaned that up. That’s why he’s popular with people—to whatever extent he’s popular.”
“So if it’s not a mob that did Dubinin in, who would have done it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A bombing might be terrorism but targeting your friend…”
Again with the “friend.”
“…doesn’t seem like a terrorist operation. There’s still crime here, I guess, and it’s organized but it depends on who’s doing the organizing.”
I nodded like I was following here. I wasn’t though. Thankfully, she kept talking.
“Maybe the first place you look is whoever cleaned up the gangs and street crime,” she said. “They’d have access to do a bombing in a professional way. And it does seem like a professional job.”
“Yeah, it was thorough enough, like they had done this before, or at least didn’t have to work from a manual,” I said.
“Do you remember the bombing in the subway a few years back?” she asked me.
I told her I did. It was 2010. I remember reading about it when I was booking my first trip to Russia after Hunts promoted me to the scouting director’s job. It made me leery about taking the subway. And right at that moment I wished that she hadn’t reminded me.
“They shut down the Moscow subways for a few hours—the sort of thing that grounds the city to a complete dead stop. Officials said the Chechens were behind it.”
I anticipated her point. “They ‘said’ the Chechens…” I chipped in and borrowed her air quotes.
“Yeah and that’s how I had to report it twelve hours after the fact when Medvedev did his tour of the station after their investigation, never mind that all the professional Kremlin watchers and the few surviving skeptics in the public thought it was orchestrated. ‘When in doubt, throw it on a Chechen.’ The idea was that the FSB staged it. You couldn’t find anyone in a foreign embassy who didn’t think it was an FSB operation. ‘A little panic in the public and they’ll come running back to the strongman.’ You knew for a fact that Putin was going to win the election after being on-hiatus Prime Minister…”
Thankfully, she didn’t feel like she had to explain to me that the Russian constitution limited Putin to two terms before sitting out while his puppet Medvedev kept the seat warm for him for four years.
“…but Putin and his people didn’t leave anything to chance,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said.
“Never mind that the boys at the old KGB headquarters would probably have a security system in place that would sniff out a Chechen who was carrying as much as a firecracker.”
“It’s the land of the false narratives,” she said. “You know the quote that came out of the backroom of the Bush administration? ‘We create our own reality.’ ”
The whole quote was: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
“That could be anywhere,” I said.
“Maybe, but here they’ve mastered it—there’s no line between stagecraft and statecraft,” she said.
A few wordless seconds passed. We were going over stuff that didn’t lend itself to romance, unless poli-sci or the cheapness of life gets your groove on. I had to change the subject. I had to get to her personal life. Better that than drifting off into mine and having to talk about my on-and-off relationship with Sandy, the psychologist who had worked with my daughter in difficult times. Or, for the old times, the divorce that ranked No. 7 in Entertainment Weekly’s Worst Hollywood Splits Ever and the X’s multiple trips to rehab.
I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket. No messages, no phone calls, and almost out of juice. “Do you have a charger I could use?” I said. “I’m hoping and praying someone calls with good news…not that this isn’t good news.”
She had her charger on the kitchen counter. I gave her my handheld and she plugged it in.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It will take a few hours,” she said.
“So will I.”
She laughed.
“You have someone back there in the States? Back in Canada?” I asked.
“The Someone I Have Back There is a senior at a boarding school,” she said, and I knew that a tale of woe would follow. “The Someone I Had Back There is over. All through the courts. Very messy, but I’m not a big enough media star that it landed in the tabloids.”
“Be thankful,” I said.
“I know about your story, your ex,” she said. “I Googled you before coming out to the arena tonight. Half of the hits were about hockey and half of the hits were about…”
“Being the Temporary Trophy Husband of America’s Sweetheart Before Her Fall from Grace. I actually got a call from the Biography Channel when they were doing a series of shows about sitcom stars from the ’90s. I guess they wanted to do one show with my X because Jenna Elfman bailed out.”
She laughed. I’m always okay with being a punchline so long as I tell the joke.
ВОСКРЕСЕНЬЕ
SUNDAY
1
“I’m going to show you what you missed,” she said, grabbing me by the wrist and leading me out of the living room. “You’ll wish you had come over to Moscow sooner. I’d have made you stay.”
I doubt that she could have changed my mind but she would have complicated the decision.
She gave me a shove. I put up no resistance, taking the dive and landing on my back on her bed. She left the bedroom light off but the light from her living room still on, so she was backlit, a silhouette slipping off her high heels and then everything on up.
My mind raced.
I got plenty when I was in Moscow. The twins had been the stuff of Letters to Penthouse and I’ve gotten a fair amount of mileage out of that story over the years, others too. Yeah, I had worked my way down the length of the bar at the Boar’s Head and the girls there always gave 110 percent. In their chilly eyes and wild imaginations, I had passed for a ticket out of the Boar’s Head. I wasn’t a sex tourist like those fat Schnitzel-faced Germans at the bar. I was better than that in the girls’ eyes. Not a hockey hero or anything like that. That stuff was meaningless to them. No, I was a business traveller and they were there for the exporting.
This was different. Not just that I was further removed from my small glories and fractionally wiser. Not just that Lee Siddon was at a different time of her life than the twins and the rest of them, though her body would make any red-blooded man believe that her birth certificate was a forgery. No, here was a woman who spoke truth to power in a country where citizens were voiceless. Her work had to be frustrating, like panning for gold at a water fountain, but it was hopeful in its own way. Even with the unbroken cycles of evasions, denials, and bald lies, she was waiting for that one chance when she might make a difference. Maybe she was blindly hopeful, maybe bravely, maybe recklessly, what with the girls from Pussy Riot landing in jail, environmental protesters getting beaten to a pulp for gathering in Red Square, and political opponents and rivals fleeing, disappearing, or dying suspiciously. Lee Siddon would sit across from Putin and spar with a guy out of her weight class. She was powerless by comparison but full of purpose. She had a battery that would never go dead. Plug me into it and charge me up overnight.
Her bra dropped from her hand and hit the floor. Her breasts were absolutely perfect. They sat up in defiance of age and gravity.
“When did you know that you wanted me?” she asked.
“When the director was counting down,” I said. That was plausible, less animalistic than the truth. The thought had actually occurred to me when I saw her on the screen back at the Marriott.
We had checked history and politics at the bedroom door. We went wordless. There was no talking when she had a mouthful of me and when I had to breathe through my nose. We went thoughtless as we yinged and yanged. There was no thinking straight. Every twitch of her hard body was building to a scream but stopping at the precipice, four times, five times, almost there. Then she pragmatically straddled me. She was still mostly in silhouette but by the light of the alarm clock beside her bed I could see that her eyes were shut and her jaw slack. “Yes…yes…yes…,” she said, as if a director was in her earpiece asking if she was ready to go to live.
When she finally fell back onto the pillow, it took her a minute to catch her breath. I didn’t mind watching her breasts rise and fall. As an Established Admirer of the Body Aesthetic, I would have been happy to do that all night. Eventually she spoke.
“It’s been a long time,” she said.
“We’ll work you into game shape yet,” I said as I rolled on my side. I propped my head in my hand and scanned her from ankle to eyes, pausing at a couple of stops along the way.
“I’m sure I’ll do it again,” she said.
“Sounds promising.”
Martinis have never been my first choice of drink, but they were hers and I’m an Anything To Get Along and Get It On Kind of Guy. On her bed we set about sweating out the gin and vermouth.
When we had been sitting on the couch in the living room, I had spotted a photo of her on the mantle over the fireplace. It was a souvenir of the 10k run on Moscow’s streets. The lens caught her just as her perfect breasts crossed the finish line. In the photo she had her arms raised over her head and her head tilted back, her eyes closed as she made communion with physical ecstasy. Here in the dark I grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her arms back in the same position. The sweat that was dripping on her was falling from my hair and my chest. Her eyes were closed again but I’m sure they rolled skyward and could see stars, even though clouds threw a thick blanket over Moscow.
2
Night had become morning, time for Fond Adieus, Sheepish Looks, and Let’s Get Together Soons. I could have stayed for breakfast but I decided against it. One thing would have led to the other thing. No, we had to set aside our animal urges. She needed sleep before she could go to work, while I had work to do before I could sleep contentedly. I had to get back to the job of doing whatever it was going to take to hold on to my job.
I checked my iPhone. Charged up.
“Is there a number that I can call for a cab back to the Marriott?”
“No,” she said. “Just one of the downsides here. They’re so unreliable. It would take a driver hours to get here if he came at all. The subway is faster and easier anyway.”
She gave me the directions. “You can’t miss it,” she said. She went online to print off a map of the streets and another of the Metro. She was all attention to detail. She stuffed the map in my pocket, draped her arms around me, and asked when I was going to be back.
“As soon as humanly possible,” I said.
“Tonight?”
“I’m ready and willing. I can’t speak for able, but I promise I’ll do my best.”
“We’ve only started.”
“I hope so.”
A kiss. Several. Like schoolkids again. A look that lasted right through the closing of the door. I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, committing the whole night to memory.
The subway was two blocks from her condominium. I tried to find my legs and get the blood flowing on the walk. I had a buzz on and a mind full of bad intentions when we had arrived at her apartment, so I didn’t get a make on the neighbourhood she lived in. Lee said it was called Kropotkinskaya, a place where a lot of foreign workers and the newly minted Russian oligarchs camp out in elegance befitting them, inside the Garden Ring, the first ring outside the one that tightly circles the Kremlin and Red Square.
I could see the gold dome of an old cathedral and some restored piles where friends of the Czar used to live. I could also see townhouses designed by Scandinavian architects and built of poured mortar, steel, and opaque, bulletproof glass. On a bright day they’d blind you with reflected sunlight. In the dark they practically disappeared from sight.
I walked down Gogolevskiy Boulevard and tried to imagine what it would be like to live here. I knew a couple of guys who took jobs coaching KHL teams for a season or two for big bucks. I couldn’t do it. I held out some hope of getting back to Lee’s at day’s end but I knew that was probably not realistic. I had a lot on my plate. I took some consolation in the fact that I could always enjoy a nightcap with her on my next trip to Moscow.
At that point the rush of endorphins gave way to adrenaline-drenched paranoia. A slamming door behind me breached the silence on the street and I turned my head. A Muscovite had hopped in his Benz and was pulling away from the curb. That was the prompt but not what demanded my attention. Thirty or forty yards back I saw a guy with his head down, hunched like he was trying to shrink out of sight, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a heavy grey coat. Before I could get a good look at him, he ducked into the covered doorway of a low-rise condo hard by the sidewalk. The morning was cold but windless and the streetlight fell on the doorway, so I could see clouds of hot breath billowing out in a slow rhythm. He took too long to be fumbling with keys. I was being tailed. A guy looking to roll me, I thought. I had a good head start on him and he was working alone or at least it looked that way. I picked up the pace, blithely confident that I could shake him on the subway.
Lee was right. There was no missing Kropotkinskaya Station. I didn’t have to look hard for the glowing red M that marks all the city’s Metro stops. I found it in the shadow of an arch rising five stories over the entrance. With its set of columns and small kiosks, it didn’t look like a subway entrance as much as a memorial or a small museum.
Weary-looking Muscovites were standing on the sidewalk beside the stairs down to the gates and the platform. They weren’t the people who lived in the palaces and the beautiful bunkers. They were the help. They were waiting to go home after overnight shifts in the 24/7 businesses that serviced a neighbourhood they could never aspire to live in themselves. They had to wait around in the cold because the subway wasn’t running yet.
I rooted around my pocket for a ticket that Lee had given me. I looked around to see if anybody was eyeballing me. It was still pitch black out and it wouldn’t take much for the pettiest criminal to get off at the same Metro stop and mug me at gunpoint on my walk back to the hotel. It seemed like I was going unnoticed and I kept my head down. Two or three minutes later I heard Metro workers pull open the massive steel doors to let in the first riders of the day. As a small pack, maybe a dozen of us, we started down the steps to the turnstiles and then the escalator to the platform. The sign said 1. That was the Metro line, the Sokolnicheskaya line as Lee had laid it out. No other lines run through the station, not like other stations that are tangled in a spider’s web of subway routes spreading out all over the city. Yeah, there was no confusing it, couldn’t have been simpler. Lee had said that I should ride Line 1 someday when I had the time and get off at each stop to see the architecture of the original stations dug back in the ’30s. “Maybe next trip you can give me a tour,” I said and smiled.
Those who were getting on the first train of the day milled around wordlessly. I was fairly confident that I hadn’t been followed into the station, but even with a one-percent chance I figured I should separate myself from the crowd and any watchers. With dozens of pillars to hide behind, a tail would have blind spots to work from, so I started down to the end of the platform. Walls, ceiling, and thick columns were done in red granite and pale marble. The platform looked like a venue not for riders but for invited guests who would proceed down a receiving line, bowing and curtsying before working their way to the czar.
The first train of the day roared up and pulled to a sharp stop. The last set of doors in the second car from the end opened up in front of me and I walked through them. The car wasn’t quite empty. A couple of guys in ragged dusty overalls were riding to a construction site, sitting opposite each other with their helmets in their laps. One stared at the floor. The other had his head back and eyes closed. Both looked like they had each drained a twenty-sixer the night before, and maybe more. I didn’t register with them and I was ecstatic about that.
