The third man in, p.17
The Third Man In, page 17
“I need you to do me a favour,” I said from the back seat. I was asking a lot and coming to the dead limit of chips I could call in. I couldn’t see that in Marks’s face. I was looking at the back of his head. I could see Ivan’s eye-roll in the rear-view mirror, though.
“Shit, can’t we just go back to the hotel? Maybe have a couple at the hotel bar?”
We didn’t.
I had an idea that wasn’t thought through enough to qualify as a plan.
I counted on Marks being brave enough or reckless enough to go back to the Boar’s Head. He was understandably reluctant after his beat-down. Predictably, he could be coaxed, given his employment prospects for next season and neurons that fired when sparked by the prospect of drink. He had been dry for thirty-six hours or so. Back at the hotel I had a nap and recharged my battery and my iPhone’s. Meanwhile, Marks freshened up and pressed a suit. He wasn’t a New Man when he met Ivan and me in the lobby a couple of hours later, more like a Reasonable Facsimile of His Former Self.
Marks again voiced his reluctance to go on the fishing expedition I had planned for him.
“Shadow, I have a policy that has served me well….I never go back to a place where there’s been trouble until the bruises heal,” he said. “I’m not sure these bruises will ever heal. I’ve gone deep for you. I can’t go much deeper.”
Les Buchanan was at Home Depot shopping for a broom big enough to sweep Vancouver’s front office clean, so Kelly Markham couldn’t afford to say no to anybody asking favours. He had lots of friends in the biz but not enough good friends.
Half an hour later, we walked in the front door of the Boar’s head. I was counting on Anastasia, the Widow in Spirit, popping in. If she had decided to stay at home and mourn Dubinin’s memory, we’d have turned around and gone back to the Marriott. She didn’t let me down, though. She had assumed her usual perch by the bar.
“Give her points for showing up,” Marks had said when we walked in the door. “You’d think she woulda stayed home, what with her man blown to bits.”
“A real profile in courage,” I had replied.
“Why’d she come out, Shadow? Seeing all she’s leaving behind?”
“No, I don’t see it as a victory lap. Anywhere else in the world staying home and dressing in black and that shit would be what you’d expect…”
I took a big swig and looked around before finishing the point.
“And anywhere else, being the Dutiful Grieving Mistress widow would be perfect cover if you were running a game. With a girl like her in a place like this, shit, something like mourning is enough to rouse suspicions.”
“Pretty fuckin’ icy,” he had said, straightening his collar like he was heading out on a first date. “They’re not like you and me.”
“Truer words you’ve never spoken, Marks, but listen, if you’d come around another time, different circumstances, Dubinin not in the picture, it would have been your pant leg she’d have been hanging on to.”
“You think?”
“I know. What’s more, she’ll realize that in the first thirty seconds you’re up there.”
I gave Marks his instructions.
“Buy her a drink and don’t come on to her,” I said. This was like telling Ted Williams how to hit a fastball or bait a hook. And this was like telling the Splendid Splinter to check his swing on a fat pitch or throw back his trophy catch.
“Don’t?”
“Don’t. Just keep her talking. Just keep her listening.”
I gave Marks a pat on the back that finished with a shove. He tugged at his sleeves to show his gold cufflinks. Marks made his way through the girls to take his place at the bar beside the girl of interest and then, without looking at her, offered to buy her a drink. I was counting on her accepting and she came through, like the sun does rising in the east.
I took my place down the bar, on the comely flank of Daria, the former roommate of the girl with a ticket to Vienna.
“Look at our friends,” I said, nodding at Anastasia and Marks. “Isn’t love grand?”
Daria sniffed and sneered.
“My friend, Kelly, his family in America is very rich,” I said. “Hockey is just a hobby. That suit…”
“…is very good,” she said.
I didn’t skip a beat with the interruption. “That suit is Brooks Brothers, famous clothes,” I said. “He had to go to London before coming to Moscow. His cousin’s wedding. A businessman.”
“It looks like rich man’s clothes,” she said. “You don’t see here.”
That was the point I was trying to get Marks to impress on Anastasia. A fish might know the hook is baited but can’t stop biting.
“Tell me everything about Anastasia,” I said.
“What is to say?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “For a start, say, how did you meet?”
“We are children together. Same building. Same school. Near here. All our lives friends. Not now.”
She covered the course of three decades in sixteen words. If you are pressed for time, brevity is an asset. I was pressed for time, sure, but more so for details, so I needed her to be a little more expansive.
“She’s staying in Moscow now that her boyfriend is dead? It must be awful.”
Though I had confided in Marks the fact that I had seen Dubinin or someone who looked too much like him for a split second that morning, I had an embargo on the chimera.
“She tells me she goes to Austria,” she said.
Tense is the first casualty of a language barrier. Go slow. Keep it simple.
“She told you that before her boyfriend died?”
She said nothing. She had her head down as she crushed out another cigarette, every last surviving ember. I ducked and fished for eye contact in the faint hope to get her attention. To get in her sightline I would have had to put my ear in the ashtray.
I opted to Re-ask and Rephrase. “When did she tell you she was going to Austria? Before Dubinin died?”
Nothing registered. I took one last stab, an appeal to an ounce of empathy that might have survived her travails.
“Dubinin’s dead,” I said, leaving Belov out of the tally of the fallen because I supposed she’d have no idea who he was. “I know, there’s nothing we can do about that. Dubinin’s not coming back to life. But there’s a kid, barely nineteen…he’s out there and he might be in danger.”
“Life is danger,” she said.
I looked up and down the stand-up at the Boar’s Head. Her comrades on the night shift were nailed to their spots on spiky heels. Each came in alone. Each found a place at the bar like it had been handed out by assignment. Each took her place without making eye contact or saying a word to a neighbour she had stood beside for how many nights and how many years. Each turned her back on the bartender, who set up a line of drinks in which ice cubes would completely melt before the glasses were stamped with thick red lip-prints. Each young or not-so-young woman stood as solitary as an uninhabited island off the Siberian coast.
“Yeah, and my life ‘is danger’ too,” I said, grabbing her arm, a move on impulse that reflexively raised her empty gaze to horizontal. I squeezed hard without changing my expression. I did a quick left-and-right to make sure that the doormen weren’t going to brace me for unappreciated pawing. “When did she tell you she was going to Austria? Before the bomb?”
“Before,” she said, “and after.”
“After?”
“The night after we see the bomb on television,” she said. “She say she goes. She say it’s not problem.”
Give Anastasia points for resilience if not romance, I thought. I tried to coax a little more out her friend.
“How did she seem? Sad? Angry?”
“Always same,” Daria said. “She say she goes to Vienna. Things don’t change.”
“Did she cry?”
“No. Never.”
“Did she love him?”
“Technical, yes.”
Okay, some things get lost in translation and others require a cryptographer.
“What the hell is technical?”
“She is his woman. She says she is and now. She says she goes to Vienna because he wants that. He makes this for her from before time. Her job is there. It’s not problem…”
Is. Now. Wants. Makes. Was. Wanted. Made. Before time.
“…that the guy who set it up for her is in pieces, yeah, isn’t that always the way young love goes,” I said, going too fast for her to pick up the sarcasm.
“She goes,” she said. “Everybody does same. I do the same, same thing to me.”
That I didn’t doubt. I couldn’t tell if she and her friend had dry ice pumping through their veins or something colder.
“Where does she live? Where is the apartment?” I asked.
“She sells it.”
“It’s her apartment? Her condo? She owns it?”
“Yes.”
“When did she buy it?”
“Dubinin gives it to her. Week before, two week before.”
I have sweated and toiled and kept my head down and sucked it up as much as my conscience allowed, but I’ve never had such luck, being gifted a piece of valuable real estate by a benefactor just days before said benefactor’s last ride was cut short.
“Where is it, the apartment?”
She gave me the cross-streets. I committed them to memory.
“I need you to help me,” I said. “Please.”
“Buy me a drink,” she said and lit another cigarette.
I pulled out my Amex.
12
All the while that I spoke to Daria, I could see Marks making progress down the bar.
Anastasia had turned up her nose at him when he had sidled up next to her. She had to recognize his leer from two nights before. She lowered her delicate proboscis one degree after spotting his Prada Saffiano wallet. She had dipped it another degree when he yanked out his platinum card. She dipped it still another when she zoomed in on his Yale ring, not because of a rock-by-rock valuation, which she calculated instantly, but rather because she owned an acute sense of everything that signified a certain social power and influence. Anastasia always told the same story to inostrannyye svin’I, the foreign pigs. She told them she was a student. She recognized their unconcealed smiles and barely contained laughter. She knew that they thought of her as a common working girl, no different from the others lining the bar. What they didn’t know about her, she thought, was all the wisdom she earned in a very hard way, standing at the bar all these hours and all these nights, and in much harder ways that she had learned how to never revisit. She regarded herself as a genius when it came to the study of human nature, picking up cues at a bare glance.
For Anastasia, Marks’s birthright was easy reading, like pulling out a deck of cards and sorting Kings and Jacks from Deuces and Jokers. Her mastery extended to the tough stuff, the stuff vital to making a buck and avoiding physical peril in her soon-to-be former occupation. She recognized the violent ones, the stalkers, and knew how to avoid them and how to avoid offending them. She could intuitively determine who was going to be good for the negotiated rubles for an evening of her company. She had used her unerring powers for profiling to make the first patron with a legitimate potential to take her away from all this, and she used her commensurate sexual prowess to close that deal. And now, with her berth to a better life secured in the form of a ticket to Vienna, along comes another.
She had come to the Boar’s Head just to survey the room, looking for those who would buy her a few drinks just for the sport of it.
Marks’s wasn’t the life Anastasia was leaving behind and his wasn’t the life she was heading to either. Not that she allowed herself to grow wistful or felt a romantic pang in all of her life, but still, she couldn’t help but think that if he were younger and this was another place, she’d have made a play to have him to herself. She knew nothing about Markham Industries or Yale or Augusta. Still, she made him for exactly what he was. She could see he belonged to a class of men who didn’t come to the Boar’s Head, the Better Born. They were the ones who stayed in the five-star hotels, foreign businessmen who ate in the five-star restaurants that Dubinin had brazenly taken her to, men of money who wouldn’t dirty themselves at this bar but extravagantly tip concierges for placing a call to five-star call girls.
She also intuited Marks’s past. She recognized that he was human in ways that Dubinin never could be. He had known defeats and heartbreaks enough to have empathy for others, so refreshing to her compared to Dubinin’s unsurpassable self-love.
Marks was on Drink No. 2. He had Anastasia reeled in. Silver at the temples, good genes, and a love of the gym keeping him fit in spite of all of his vices, he was outside her age range but a check mark beside every other item on her list. Anastasia could use time spent with him to ward off the advances of the Boar’s Head’s sordid clientele.
After a lifetime of suffering disrespectful company, she was powerless to turn away from a man who didn’t covet her. In him she had a sense of what she missed, a thought that she’d never allow to make her sad, and a sense of what awaited her with a new start, a prospect that raised goose bumps on her long, pale, thin arms. There are people out there like him and better, she thought, and, on further consideration, now I’m going to be one of them too.
“I am working at the embassy in Vienna,” Anastasia said.
“A beautiful city.”
“You have been there?” she asked, knowing that one wrong turn would expose the fact that she hadn’t.
“Many times,” he said. He didn’t have to improvise too hard. His search for a plausible scenario came so easily that a lie detector wouldn’t have twitched. He launched into a little monologue about a life he knew, his oldest brother’s. That life would have been Marks’s if he had never picked up a hockey stick, if he had simply fallen into step with his siblings and the other boys at his New England prep school. “Our family’s company is in computer tech, security systems, government work,” he said. “My father is too old to travel, so he sends me. We have an office in Vienna.”
This talk about “company” and “systems” and “government” made Marks a person of interest to Anastasia. She even mentally highlighted the fact that his father was “too old,” a line of succession in the offing. In the middle of all this, a red flag had gone up for her: he knew Vienna. She stopped him before he could say or ask anything more about a city that was still a promise and not yet a reality for her. She had practiced and performed this turnaround in conversation deftly and it had often been the prelude to bigger things and to men pulling out their wallets for her. Let him talk about his favourite subject. Let him talk about himself.
“Where are you from in America?”
“From Boston,” he said.
“Your family. A wife?”
“No. I’ve had a couple but things didn’t work out,” he said, reverting from his brother’s story to his own, his words as dark and hollow as a capsized oil drum. “There’s still hope. And you?”
“Yes, I have husband.”
“I thought you would,” he said, despite the pale white space on the third finger of her left hand. “You’re too beautiful to be alone. You could have any man you want.”
She smiled. One hundred musicians performed a symphony, scoring the American’s flattery. The music quieted.
“He’s from Vienna?”
“No, he’s from Moscow, so we get married when we go to Vienna,” she said, speaking of an alternative reality she never allowed herself to consider.
“Congratulations.”
She felt obliged to explain the absence of the laughably cast groom-to-be. “He visits his family and then we go,” she said. “Not tomorrow. We go day after…day after…”
“Wednesday?”
“Yes, this is not tomorrow, but next and next,” she said, chopping her hand as if these days of the week were the last slices of an ordinary and awful life.
“He’s coming here tonight…meeting you tonight?”
“He does not come to this place. He doesn’t like it. I meet him later.”
“But you met him here in Moscow?”
A more comfortable territory to talk about. “Yes, we met here…”
She caught herself. A slip. Yes, they met in the bar but that is too much to tell. A bare hesitation. Talking in big circles is so much safer, she thought.
“…in Moscow. It is a big city. To meet someone is difficult but it should not be. Maybe you meet someone.”
“Maybe,” Marks said. “You have a home here and in Vienna.”
“We have a home here,” she said, proud of the semi-fact. “We look for a home in Vienna maybe, but perhaps we have to move again. His work, my work.”
“He works in the embassy too?” Marks said.
I heard that snippet of conversation and thought: cast the line one more time, Ted Williams, hook the beautiful catch, but don’t reel her in. Let her fight to get away.
“He is businessman.”
And so it went. I was within earshot. Marks was facing her and I was behind her. I had turned my back, just in case she sneaked a peek. Her purse was there, hanging perilously off her right shoulder and around to the back of her rib cage. Facing in the opposite direction, I closed my eyes and pretended to be listening to the pounding music from the dance floor. Eyes shut, I could better visualize the zipper of her yawning purse, and off in my own world I only felt my heart pound. She didn’t feel the drop at all, my iPhone embedding deeply in the folds, buried beside lipstick, perfume, and compacts. It wound up nestled under a wallet she’d have no occasion to use the rest of the night.
понедельник
MONDAY
1
When Dubinin’s girlfriend finally asked for her cheque, by then a historic item with a single drink on it, Marks intercepted it. He turned on the Old Money Charm. He said something about how beautiful she was. Not in a suggestive way, just coming off as a man educated in the aesthetic of the feminine pulchritude. He asked if he could see her again. Socially, of course. Perhaps with her husband. He told her that he liked talking to her and would be interested in meeting him. He said that maybe they could get together in Vienna. He was older, yeah, but she would have bitten on it, socially or not, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. This time she had to pass. “I cannot,” Anastasia said. “There are reasons.” She didn’t specify them.
