The third man in, p.20
The Third Man In, page 20
One final call: I dialled Sarge. I gave him the straight goods about the threats, although I skipped a few of the messiest details for the sake of time and Ivan’s dwindling iPhone battery. I told Sarge that Lanny was getting the calls probably from a New York connection to Russian hoods who were trying to tie up Dmitrov. Sarge said that he had a friend, a RCMP guy, who had a friend, a decorated FBI agent, who might be able to do something. He didn’t oversell it, though.
“Gonna take a couple of days to go through channels before you get a call from the FBI or CIA or whatever,” he said.
I told him that in a couple of days I might already be home or he’d be sorting through my effects. “If it comes to that, remember I’ve got a tab at the Merry Widow to clear,” I said.
When I was through with Sarge, I rang my room where Marks would have his feet up and be dozing with CNN International on in the background. Unless he had ordered porn to the room.
“Shadow, it’s me, Lorne,” I said.
“Uh, yeah, ‘Lorne,’ been a while, wassup?”
“Listen, I got some computer issues. Effin’ software. Any chance I can use the one you got there? And the phone and charger. And I’m outta Celebrex too. Pretty sorry. Can I get a spare vial off you? I think I saw the guy who works for you…”
“You mean Ivan?”
“Yeah, I saw him out front of the hotel. Said he was looking for you.”
“Is that so?” he said.
“Yeah, you should go talk to him,” I said.
“Whatever you say, ‘Lorne.’ You know I can’t see any Celebrex, but there’s Preparation H. Would that help?”
“Don’t get any of that on you,” I told him. “You’ll disappear.”
“You kill me, Lorne.”
“Just give me your Celebrex. You probably left it in the washroom or something.”
Marks loaded the computer, my anti-inflammatories, my old iPhone, and its charger into my gym bag and then came downstairs, where he spotted Ivan standing outside the front doors. Ivan walked him a hundred yards back up the road where the car was parked outside the church.
By then I wasn’t there.
7
When I made that call as good ol’ Lorne, I was ducking down in the back seat of Ivan’s wife’s car. I was staying out of view, holding my breath every time a car passed. If I exhaled and fogged a window it might raise suspicions.
If someone had followed us back to the hotel or if someone had got the licence plate number when we left the scene, we would have been in the soup, but it seemed like we had made a clean getaway, the hour being a little too early for predawn traffic. I allowed myself a bare peek out the back window and then another out the front. So far it seemed like my call to Marks hadn’t tripped an alarm. I panned the street and saw no patrol but I jumped on reflex when heard a creaking sound, metal in need of oiling. I sneaked a look in the rear-view mirror and saw a minister opening the gate to the grounds of the Anglican church. Sanctuary. It was an opportunity I hadn’t anticipated, but an opportunity nonetheless. Marks had a hotel pen in the vest pocket of his ski jacket. I left a note on the driver’s seat for the boys: “Have to use the can. Will be back in 10. Thx, Lorne.”
I was ragged. The sleeve of Marks’s jacket was torn at the shoulder, a souvenir of my tussle with Dubinin. I looked less like a worshipper than a lost soul when I walked through the gate and onto the church grounds. I could have prayed for forgiveness but that wasn’t appropriate with Dubinin’s Gyurza tucked into the back of my pants. In this little island of peace, I wanted to stash Dubinin’s piece.
I didn’t see the minister when I slipped through the gate but he saw me.
“Privet ya mogu pomoch’ vam?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the man with a turned-up collar. “I don’t speak Russian. I’m a Canadian.”
“Oh, quite, yes,” he said. “I don’t speak Russian either, or at least speak it well. Can I help you?”
“I’m just a business traveller,” I said. I couldn’t have looked less like one in Marks’s ski jacket, and the minister had to have noticed but let it be. “I’ve seen the grounds here when I stay at the Courtyard and I always wanted to get a closer look at this.”
“An interest in architecture then? History?”
“Well, not a professional one,” I said.
“It’s too bad that you couldn’t be here in the summer when the lawns and trees are a lush green,” he said. “We really are the green space nearest Red Square. But that’s only a couple of months a year. Most of the time is like it is now, snow-covered, much like your country, I suppose.”
That suited me, all the better to bury a revolver in.
“If you’re staying on, we’d love to have you at a service,” he said. Though he made me for a guy who either didn’t practice or had given up believing, he was obliged to roll out the welcome mat.
After two minutes of ever-smaller small talk, we were politely interrupted. A voice came from behind me and I tensed until the voice registered. “Well, old man, I didn’t think I’d find you here at this hour,” Trevor Parry said. “Up all night with the jet lag, maybe?”
The minister wanted to make introductions but didn’t have my essentials. “Mr….I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” he said.
“Brad Shade,” I said. If you can’t trust a guy with a turned-up collar, what’s the use?
“Yes, is Mr. Shade a friend of yours, Trevor?”
“We met the other night. Our Canadian friend.”
“Mr. Shade wanted to look at our building.”
“Let me show him around, Father.”
And so it was done. Off we went and we sat in the pews. Parry explained himself. “I come here in the morning for quiet meditation before I go off to the salt mine,” he said. “I’m heading up the restoration committee. We’ve come a long way but we’re not taking shortcuts and thankfully we have benefactors who appreciate the good works here. Beautiful, isn’t it? I had studied to be in the clergy, but I was destined for other things. Can’t help but think about the road not taken when I sit here.”
I must have seemed distracted. I don’t like having a gun on me, never mind a stolen one in a church.
“Are you quite alright?”
“I’m in a predicament,” I said. He put his hand on my shoulder. I spared him the blow-by-improbable-blow. I told him what he needed to know and nothing more. Then I asked him questions.
8
“Say, ‘Lorne,’ when you’re hiring, are you gonna be looking for a scout or a manservant?” Marks asked.
I had stayed in the church for fifteen minutes with Trevor Parry comparing notes and then a few more after he had left. Then I had made the necessary trip to the washroom, hung up Marks’s ski jacket in the cloakroom to be lost and never found, and ditched Dubinin’s piece at the foot of a snow-covered hedge just to the left of the front door.
Marks was sitting in the front seat when I got back to the car. I had no idea what Ivan had told him and I didn’t care.
“Give me my coat, Marks,” I said.
He didn’t want to give up my black leather jacket, advertised as lined but hopeless in a Moscow winter. “What happened to my ski jack—”
“You can’t wear it,” I told him. “Wrecked it. Sorry.”
“I’m gonna have to walk around Moscow in a sweatshirt,” he said. “Shadow, it’s below fuckin’ zero.”
“You wear that ugly fuckin’ thing and you’re going to get picked up.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“And I don’t have the time to explain everything right now. Just buy a new coat. Whatever the cost I’ll make it back to you. You should be able to get something nice at the end-of-season sales.”
“Fer fuck sakes,” he said. “They only have one fuckin’ season here.”
Marks passed my leather coat into the back seat and sat there shivering, a taste of what he had to look forward to when summer would roll around and he’d become a Friend of Bill W. Really, he’d be striking up a former acquaintance, his vows seeming more heartfelt on this the third try, with his hockey career in the balance. Maybe all this turned out to be the Intervention By Ordeal he needed.
“If you’re thinking about career opportunities, look at it this way,” I said. “If things go sideways here, L.A. is going to be looking for a scouting director to replace the guy they’re having a moment of silence for.”
Marks didn’t smile but he corrected his attitude. “I’m going to go to bed and pretend this was all a bad dream,” he said. “Can I do that in my own room, Lorne?”
9
Ivan stayed in the car while I went into a coffee shop four blocks from St. Andrew’s and the Courtyard. The place was filled with university students absorbed by their computer screens and textbooks, so I went unnoticed. I grabbed a coffee. I just pointed at a pot and the girl behind the counter pointed at the price. I grabbed a table, popped open my Mac, and powered up. Advantages: no password to enter, no agreement to sign off on. Disadvantage: internet connection was going to be hit-and-miss and, even when operational, as slow as stone carving. The possibility that my connection might not be a secure one did cross my mind. It was just a risk I had to run.
While I waited for the connection to be made, I tapped my personal iPhone into the laptop’s port to boost the juice to full charge.
I checked my email in my team account. Hunts with a big red exclamation mark, subject line: WTF. I opened his note and it consisted of “WTF” and nothing more. I typed in a reply: “Developments here, Dubinin story is complicated & chance that we can still get Dmitrov.” Then I sent him a follow-up message: “Can Galvin get anything done at the U.S. consulate if I need help…a visa for Dmitrov, maybe protection for me?” I wanted to sound the alarm. I wanted Hunts to understand that I was up to my neck in Serious Shit.
I waited for Hunts to punch in. I thought I should at least look like I came in for the coffee. My hand trembled when I lifted the cup from the table to my lips. I looked around to see if anyone noticed, took a deep breath, and then I kept my head down. I had the taste of death in my mouth, in this case the backwash of java that tasted like it had been dripped through used grounds and cigarette butts. I didn’t bother with a second sip and let the swill go cold. Just the whiff of it was making me nauseous.
I checked my team email account again. I gritted my teeth through the long pause and spinning wheel. Hunts wasn’t back to me yet. He was probably so mad at this point that he was fumbling with the keypad on his BlackBerry. I then checked my Yahoo account and found two items. The league alumni association: oh, if I could only be at the Breakers for the mid-winter golf tournament, I’d take up golf just to get out of this jam. Facebook: an alert that my daughter had tagged me in three photos on her page. Gone but not forgotten.
While I waited for Hunts to reply, I tried to stay busy at the keyboard and not look like I was loitering to stay out of the cold. I opened another tab and signed on to Facebook. I don’t have a profile picture, just that generic silhouette, not a bad fit in my case. No likes. No personal info. Not a single post, just a note that I joined Facebook in 2006. My daughter is my only friend. I had only created an account to keep tabs on her back when she was in middle school. I looked at the notifications and found the three old shots from my playing days that she had posted: two action shots and one with me raising the Cup in Montreal. I didn’t bother to like or comment on any of them. Looking at the pixilated images I couldn’t help but to think that I wasn’t aging that well. I was thankful there wasn’t a mirror in the coffee shop that might show how much I had aged overnight.
I noticed that I had Friend Requests. I get dozens of them. I always leave them hanging for months on end before deleting them. A lot come from pop culturists and fans of bad ’90s TV, who know me as That Campy Sitcom Star’s Trophy Husband. I’ll get a few from hockey fans or autograph collectors who put it together that I am the one and the same Brad Shade, he of 458 games in the league. I decided to clear the swelling inventory of requests while I sat in the café. It seemed a good time for killing off Would-Be Friends. Down the forty-three requests I went, one by one. I dismissed the captain of my daughter’s team, Total Stranger, Elk Grove Sporting Goods, Joe Daley’s Cards and Collectibles, and Muskoka Elite Hockey School. Declined them all. And then I saw one that had me hit the brakes. Hard.
Facebook is lousy with poseurs and ghosts and tributes and gags. You get fans channelling their favourite star. There’s even another Brad Shade out there, a somewhat unhinged Montreal fan who has created pages for each and every one on the Montreal team I won the Cup with back in ’93. So at first I brushed off what I saw: a friend request from Maxim Dmitrov. Or I should say another request. A few months back I’d had one cipher obsessed with the draft reach out—maybe next time he’ll even spell it right, not Maxis Dmitrov, or list his location as Magnitogorsk instead of Buffalo, N.Y. This request I assumed to be in same vein. I would have ignored it and moved on, except that I saw we had one mutual friend and I had only one to share.
For the next twenty minutes I typed furiously, IMs, emails, whatever. I hit reply and send or hard returns a dozen times. I got very prompt answers to each message by those awaiting word from me. I was busy enough at the keyboard that I was worried I might attract attention, but thankfully most of the kids in the place were wearing their earbuds.
I took a deep breath and jumped tabs back to my team account and Hunts was back to me.
When I say WTF I mean WTF fuckin explain this isn’t 20 fuckin questions.
I gave him something less than an explanation but a clarification.
Think I might have a line on Dmitrov. Think I might get out of this alive. Will update.
I closed my laptop. I didn’t need to wait around for another WTF.
I walked out to the car, woke up Ivan, and told him to drop me near a famous address.
10
It wasn’t my idea to meet outside Lenin’s Tomb. It was his.
I had to look like just another clueless tourist and I could definitely pass for one by showing up at the mausoleum that had been closed for months for repairs to water damage. The state’s infrastructure might have been creaking, but other projects would have to wait out the reno of Ol’ Vlad’s digs.
He had told me to stand in one place when I got there. He said he’d find me. He said it might take a minute or two and I just had to wait it out. He said there’d be few tourists out in the cold and he had that right. Per his instructions I kept my head down and eyes focused on a map of Red Square that I bought from a street vendor. I looked like a Five-Star Mark on the Moscow Pickpockets’ Network.
I followed the instructions he had given me an hour before. I stood stock-still and avoided eye contact with passers-by. He spotted me and drifted my way. He also had a map but kept his unfolded. And when he came to a stop ten feet to my left, I walked over to him and asked him for directions to St. Basil’s, which of course loomed massively in our line of sight.
“You don’t know St. Basil’s?” he said.
My head was on a swivel. A bunch of Japanese tourists strolled by. No one was within earshot.
“I never did the tourist thing when I was here back when. I was all about getting played, paid, and laid.”
“It’s most beautiful in world.”
“Not as beautiful as Canadian customs at Pearson International is going to look to me, but I take your point.”
“You have been in touch with him,” he said, going to business.
“I think I have,” I said. “If I haven’t, you’ve done a heckuva job scamming me. I’d come out here just to shake your hand.”
“What is this ‘scamming’?” Salnikov croaked. His basso profundo coarsened.
“Telling a story that isn’t true to get somebody’s money,” I said. “A game.”
“Mr. Shade, there is no game here,” Salnikov said.
“There might still be a game here. I could still be getting set up. Dmitrov—or whoever that was—said I should meet you. Good thing the kid knew how to get ahold of you or we wouldn’t be here. You might consider getting those business cards printed up. Rubles well spent.”
“You believe me now? That Dmitrov is in touch with you, now you believe that I represent his interests?”
“I believe you more now, yeah. I also believe I’m in a shitload of trouble and I don’t believe you can get me out of it by yourself.”
I wasn’t counting on Salnikov and I certainly didn’t mistake him for the white knight riding in to whisk me out of this mess, but I did suspect that he was acting in Dmitrov’s interests if not working as his de facto agent.
“Can you get me to him?” I said. “Or better, can you get him to me?”
“I can but maybe we don’t do this one. Now is not the time.”
I thought about it. “You have a point,” I said.
If Dmitrov was hiding out and Dubinin had his dogs out looking for me and maybe the kid, meeting up with the kid might lead the bastard right to him.
“It is of course a thing, many things, they move, English saying…”
“ ‘Many moving pieces,’ ” I said.
“Yes and Dmitrov is last piece but maybe not biggest piece,” he said.
Dmitrov seemed like the biggest piece to me but I was wrong.
11
I walked across Red Square to St. Basil’s as Salnikov told me to. I paid my way in with cash he had slipped me when we shook hands. I fell in with the English-language tour lined up at the door, just like Salnikov laid out for me. He had told me that I had “an appointment inside.” Salnikov hadn’t given me any further details on the meet. Nothing about who. Nothing about what. Nothing about why. Not even a hint. This was going to be a twenty-nine-foot-two-and-a-half-inch leap of faith.
