The third man in, p.19
The Third Man In, page 19
“I don’t know about Russia but I suspect it’s all about ‘good outcomes’ for you. Always has been.”
Figuring out who had died in the bombing was filed for later consideration. And that presumed that anyone had died at all. It wasn’t anything that I had time to think about. I hadn’t really thought anything through. I had gone looking for Dubinin but I had no idea of what to do if I found him. It was bad planning or maybe just bone stupidity.
We closed in on each other, two steps at a time. I was All Fuck You. I was burning up and that was even before he smiled, which made it all worse.
“Do whatever you want to do,” I said. “Go to Vienna. Be with your Lolita. I don’t fuckin’ care. Whatever. Just tell me where Dmitrov is.”
Until I said that it hadn’t occurred to me that maybe Dubinin couldn’t, that maybe he didn’t know. Or that maybe it had been Dmitrov in the car that had disintegrated in Dubinin’s driveway. I thought about it for a split second, felt sick to my stomach, and then got on with pressing business.
I knew we were Going to Go. I could have decided not to look for him. I could have decided not to follow him out of the building. I could have walked away. I could have tailed him and found out exactly where he was heading. I could have tried to sneak up on Dubinin. I could have jumped him. I could have handled things differently. But no, those things wouldn’t have been hockey, not mindless enough, not primal enough, not visceral enough. Even though avoidance, patience, or ambush would have been preferable to the dubious valour of announcing my arrival and my intentions.
We went.
Dubinin had been in one hockey fight that I knew of, a famous one: as an eighteen-year-old he had jumped over the bench and started a melee against Canada at the world juniors. That made him an opportunist and cheap-shot artist, not a tough guy. As a pro, yeah, he tried to skewer me, aiming the blade of his stick for the back of my eye socket. Doing that didn’t make him tough. It only proved that he understood how vulnerable everyone is when he steps on the ice with eleven other men of varying degrees of desperation. And he demonstrated an acute understanding of that vulnerability—every shift he ran from me for the rest of his brief career in the league.
All that said, I still knew I was in a real fight. I put that together in his home office when I saw the photo of him in the dojo. Ivan had given me the whole backstory while we were sitting outside the condo earlier that night: although Dubinin resigned his executive position at Dynamo’s hockey ops to take his scouting job with L.A., he stayed on as the outfit’s director of Sambo, what passes for martial arts in Russia. I knew about Sambo from my boyhood days in the karate and judo dojos. A few countries have their national variations on the martial arts and Russia’s is Sambo. And Russia being Russia, its secrets layered upon other secrets, there’s Sambo and Sambo Unseen. Imagine karate or tae kwon do using near-lethal force, a brand of fighting that makes UFC look like a waltz: that’s Sport Sambo. The blackest arts are reserved for Sambo Unseen, the stuff intended to maim and kill. Russian soldiers aren’t trusted with it. The riffraff in the ranks would leak out the secrets to the general public. No, Sambo’s most lethal techniques are classified stuff for intelligence officers and border guards. Those trained in it bypass left hooks and roundhouse kicks and go directly to gouging out eyeballs and crushing larynxes. When you see Putin rolling guys in the dojo, he sticks to judo, the white stuff, but he would have trained in Sambo back in his days as a KGB cadet. He could stand across from Obama for a photo op at a summit and snuff him with his bare hands before the boys from the Secret Service could find their holsters. Dubinin’s father would have trained in Sambo back in his KGB days. And so would Dubinin. That picture in his office with the martial-arts monster looked to be no more than five years old. Maybe the years would have taken a little off his game. That didn’t mean that he couldn’t kill you, just that he’d make a mess doing it.
Dubinin went all Bolshoi on me, tried to score points for artistic impression by going for a roundhouse. I ducked but it did more than glance off me. It cracked the side of my head and my eardrum was a tiny, thick cymbal. Suddenly my world was an echo chamber. In retrospect, I’d give him points for athleticism but mark him down for strategy—maybe he thought it was just a warm-up. What’s fine in the dojo isn’t a good idea in the street.
Going for the headshot is never my favourite opening. Everyone is looking for it and it’s a low percentage move, not to mention a cliché. As is my wont, I went after the legs first. Yeah, it lacks that Bruce Lee glamour, but if I could pop his ACL with a front kick square on his kneecap, all his Sambo wouldn’t help him. Unfortunately, my side kick didn’t catch him flush. At the last hundredth of a second he managed to turn his front foot five degrees or so, just enough that I didn’t tear up his knee right through. I knew instantly on contact my heel had made a big impression on his medial collateral ligament. It was a shot that always has a time-release effect. He was going to have a sprain that would have kept him off skates for a week back in his playing days, but he was only going to realize that in the morning. He’d hardly feel it in the throes of our little adrenaline-drenched pas de deux.
Dubinin rushed me. I didn’t want him to get a grip on my sleeve and collar. I knew that grappling with him was a dead loss. My ground game is my weak spot and chokeholds would be a strength for Dubinin or any Sambo type. If we got rolling around on the pavement, I’d probably draw my last cold breath kissing the concrete.
One miscalculation by Dubinin gave me a fighting chance: he didn’t strip off his Roeckl gloves, souvenirs of his playing and coaching days in Germany. I had noticed them when he placed them on the table at the Café Pushkin but I said nothing. That didn’t stop him from yammering on about them. He told me that they had been made to measure “by artisans.” He told me that he had bought several pairs for $700 per years back and that they’d cost “so much more now, maybe double.” It would have been a shame for the leather craftsmanship to fall in the snow even if it was brick hard. A salt stain would ruin the finish, so he left them on. And that’s the thing about martial arts or wrestling or hockey: if you want to neutralize a guy, put a pair of leather gloves on him, especially a pair so finely finished. Dubinin took a couple of swings to get inside and then tried to lock me up. I was able to bust his grip bringing my elbow down across his wrists. He tried to grab me again, but I might as well have been a bar of soap.
I had no such problems. My hands were bare and numb in the cold but still useful. Not as useful as my elbow, mind you. I flushed him with my right on the point of his chin. I felt my calcium deposit shift. That dazed him. Then I sank my fingers into that mink hat he bought at the GUM store off Red Square and yanked him toward me. His nose and cheekbone cracked on the crown of my bare head, and soon his expensive overcoat was just ruined with his blood. He was going to be an unpretty picture in the morning. I’d have lumps too, on my elbow and the thickest part of my thick melon, but at least I’d find solace and satisfaction in the fact that I had inflicted them on myself for the most worthy cause, self-preservation.
Dubinin reeled. I put him in a hammerlock and then pressed him face first into a wall. Busting out of a hammerlock is like busting into a bag of potato chips, a straight step forward, dip, and turn. Against the wall, though, you might as well try busting into a bank vault. He tried to swing his free hand but he had no point of leverage. He tried to kick my feet but I saw that coming. He even tried to back-kick me in the nuts. I didn’t have Sambo training but Sarge had tutored me in all aspects of the standard police hold and I knew what to look for. I had real-life experience going this route a few times back in my glory-free days investigating philandering husbands, larcenous employees, grifters, and fraudsters. Dubinin gave me more resistance than the other louts, but I turned the hammerlock up to ten. I lifted his right wrist practically to his left ear and his rotator cuff and elbow tendons were stretched like an E-string on violin. Another one that was going to hurt like a son of a bitch in a few hours.
I stuck my shoulder into him and pressed him with my full weight against the wall. I scraped my left knuckles against the stonework when I reached around under his jacket and found his holstered piece, a blunt-looking SR-1 Gyurza. I ripped it out and his cellphone fell on the pavement. I had a look at the piece up close. The stock was cobalt blue in the streetlight. I pressed the barrel to his earhole. He might have thought that I didn’t know where the safety was but he couldn’t chance it. He decided that he better play nice.
“I hope you can still hear me,” I said. “My left hand is unreliable. Hope this isn’t a hair trigger or anything. I mean, don’t want an accident to happen.”
He muttered under his breath. “Vy mertvy,” he said. I thought it was a plea for mercy.
“Okay, I’ll give you mertvy. Where’s Dmitrov?”
He said something but I couldn’t make it out. All I could hear was this dull white noise, all static and drone. The roundhouse must have popped my eardrum, I figured.
“If you’re going to mumble, I’ll just pull the trigger.”
“I don’t know,” he shouted.
“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve got a shake in my left hand. Old injury.”
“I don’t know. I look for him too.”
“Bullshit.”
“Is true. Is nowhere.”
“Tell me Dmitrov’s okay. Tell me it wasn’t Dmitrov you blew up in the car?”
If it had been Dmitrov in that car, I had risked my life, not to mention Kelly’s and Ivan’s, in an international snipe hunt.
“It is not him, no, he is use to me. It is Arzhanov with bomb. He is no use to me.”
That I could believe. Arzhanov had been Dubinin’s stooge. He couldn’t have been completely in the dark about Dubinin playing dirty. Still, he had been loyal to Dubinin and loyalty can blind junior partners. Arzhanov had imagined that he would always be useful to Dubinin but never imagined that he’d be ultimately useful sitting on top of a payload of plastic explosives. Only later, when the big picture became clear, I was able to put a few leftover pieces in place. The car towed away on the street when I paid my respects to Dubinin’s wife was the same one that Arzhanov had picked me up with at Domodedovo. I could say that with absolutely certainty and it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it was a circumstantial fit.
Dubinin didn’t sound as scared as he should have been. He probably presumed that I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t going to get any answers from a dead man. I couldn’t even throw a round into his non-vital parts. A gunshot would be risky. The sound would carry. Most Muscovites would take it on the lam but somebody would make a call. Just in case Dubinin was getting too comfortable and confident, I ratcheted up the hammerlock. I had him a quarter-inch from a dislocation.
“Hurt?” I said. “It’s awful. You’re a black belt and all and something mundane like a hammerlock has you dead to rights. Sort of insulting, isn’t it?”
Dubinin didn’t see the humour in it. “Vy mertvy,” he shouted.
“Okay, let’s try this,” I said. “You had something to do with Belov’s death. You’re telling his brother to sue our team.”
“I did nothing…”
“Except go to Magnitogorsk and give those two kids steroids.”
“They want this. You want players. This is what they do. I do nothing.”
“Bullshit. The Belov kid didn’t want to do anything like that. You put him up to it—”
I stopped. I heard a car start up. I took a quick look behind me. Nothing in sight.
“You were giving them steroids but not so they could play for L.A.”
“You don’t know.”
That much was true, and it might have been the only true thing that Dubinin had said so far. There was a lot I didn’t know and I didn’t know much more after rattling his cage. I did know he was alive, but that was about it. That wasn’t a good thing.
I’ll give Dubinin credit: he wasn’t panicking. He was convinced that he was going to turn this situation around, that my advantage was a blip. He had me convinced too. “Maybe you should go away while you can and forget about Dmitrov,” Dubinin said. “Then there are no more calls to residence in New Jersey. First calls, then a visit, yes. Maybe when team goes on road trip. How is this girl playing?”
I ratcheted up the hammerlock to eleven. I took no satisfaction from it. “You lay one fuckin’ hand on my daughter and I’ll kill you and take the fuckin’ consequences,” I said.
I was primed to smoke him but I was rudely interrupted. It was for the best, I suppose.
I heard a car coming fast, pedal to the floor. I took a peek: a Russian variation on a Town Car with blacked-out windows. Could have just been an airport ride, could have been hoods, could have even been FSB. I figured I had pushed my luck as far as I dared. I didn’t want to be spotted on a Moscow street with the gun to the head of a national hero, even if the national hero was being mourned in his fictional passing. It was time to bolt. I kicked Dubinin’s cellphone down the sidewalk, so that I could scoop it up when I beat my retreat.
“Sleep tight,” I bade him, and then drilled my right elbow across the base of his neck. It didn’t induce a deep sleep but it numbed him. Another elbow dizzied him. Then I loosened my grip and swung the stock of the gun somewhere about the brain stem. I could only get so much pop behind it with my left hand and a short wind-up. No matter. It still dropped him to his hands and knees. His right arm could barely hold up its small share of his weight.
“Stay down,” I said. “Count to fifty. I have you in my sights and this time I’ll pull the trigger.”
It was an empty threat and he probably didn’t believe it, but he was too wrecked to get off the canvas and test the theory. I scooped up his phone and beat it back to Ivan’s car.
Such a shame. Those beautiful gloves scuffed on the pavement.
5
Ivan had fallen asleep during my star turn in the action movie. I had to rap on the passenger-side window to wake him up.
“Thanks for having my back,” I said. “Did you not start to wonder where I was?”
“I sleep.”
“What?”
I couldn’t hear him at all. I couldn’t even hear him start the car. Or the door as I slammed it shut.
“Blood comes,” he said and he pointed to my left ear.
I slammed him with an open hand in the shoulder. I was still revved with adrenaline. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Hotel, yes,” he said.
“No, a couple of blocks away,” I said. “Dubinin might have it staked out…”
“What is Dubinin?”
“What?” I couldn’t hear anything when he hit the gas and turned the heater on high.
“You say Dubinin.”
“Somehow Dubinin survived the bombing.”
Ivan didn’t believe me. He didn’t want to believe me.
6
My heart’s desire would have been to hide in my room at the Marriott, hanging the Privacy Please sign on my door and crawling under the covers. But the hotel wasn’t going to provide any refuge at this point, and seeking it at the Courtyard would be the same as turning myself in. Dubinin’s goons would be there. He might even show up himself. Maybe with a backup piece, poison dart, or whatever.
There was no finding refuge in another hotel either. When a foreigner checks into a Russian hotel, there’s a shitload of paperwork that has to be filed in advance, a show of a visa and passport and a document issued by customs that stays behind the front desk. Without that document, I couldn’t get a room anywhere else and I’d be snagged at the airport. I couldn’t consider that option until I had all my other awful prospects semi-sorted out.
“Ivan, you have a couch at your place?” I said when we pulled up a couple of hundred yards up the one-way street from the Marriott.
Ivan gave me the I Didn’t Sign On For This Look.
I ducked my head out of view from the street and made a call on Ivan’s phone. This was one of maybe five numbers I can dial from memory. I had punched it in countless times from hotel rooms on the road with a long-distance calling card. I tried to sound calm and mostly failed.
“Look, Lanny, you have to call campus security right now about those phone calls and then get the hell out of there,” I said. “I’m going to call Brassy…”
Brassy being David Brasseur, a teammate from my days in L.A. Brassy owed me a favour going back to an incident in Malibu. He led a charmed life, salting away a lot of coin and making a couple of nice investments. He had a place in Long Branch with a nice view of the ocean, a football field worth of beachfront, and fences surpassed in the state only by Rahway. I knew his number because he personalized it. His number in his playing days had always been 27 and the last four digits of his phone number were 2727.
“…and you can stay with him. I’ll have him loan you a car. You tell your coach that you’re getting these calls and if he needs to ask me anything, get him to call me. Tell him I’ll explain everything.”
I didn’t spell out all the details. She would have thought I was making it up. I wouldn’t let her off the line until she promised me that she was going to follow the instructions to a T. I texted Brassy to give him a heads-up and told him I’d explain everything later. He was a real Boy Scout in his day and he was back to me in three minutes.
Done. At home 4 nxt 2 weeks. Have her call.
I went to my Yahoo account and found the address for Lanny’s coach. I sent an email to let him know that what she was going to tell him was on the square. Again, I didn’t go into details.
That was only the start, though. I found an email address for the league’s deputy commissioner, the No. 2 man. I had dropped Connolly a line last winter looking to find Lanny an internship somewhere in the company. Nothing came of it but at least he went to the trouble of replying. I asked Connolly to alert the boys in the league’s security office in New York that my daughter was receiving threats that were tied to my work with the team. I filled in a few more blanks on that one but not all of them. I told him that I had taken a few anonymous calls from heavies in Moscow who said they would kill any deal with Dmitrov even if it meant leaving a trail of bodies along the way. It wasn’t routine stuff for the ex-New York’s Finest on the league’s security staff, but I hoped they’d follow their long-dormant professional instincts.
