The third man in, p.21
The Third Man In, page 21
“Don’t look for anyone,” he said. “Again you will be found.”
I went in blind. The rhetorical question I asked myself: why should things start changing now?
I did a double take at the entrance when a young woman offered me an audio guide for the tour. I took a pass but five seconds later I was wondering if she had been the one I was supposed to meet. Shit. I sucked it up. Don’t give off an anxious vibe. If she was supposed to be my contact, I thought, she would catch up to me. Salnikov had told me to walk slowly on the tour, drift away after the first twenty minutes, and sit tight.
Good thing it’s a cathedral, I thought. All the tourists made it unlikely that I was walking into anything as messy as bullets or blades. Likewise, the boys from the FSB weren’t likely to arrest me in there. That would make a scene. Besides, they could have nabbed me on the walk across the square. I took small reassurances where I could find them. If they planned to get creative, target me with poison darts, radioactive isotopes, or whatever, at least I’d be in a house of prayer.
I fell off from the peloton of tour-goers and wandered aimlessly. I looked at the murals. “Any one of you up there able to give me some strength?” I said to myself in a whisper that to a Russian ear might have passed for prayer. “Didn’t think so.”
Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. I lingered like a junkie on the street corner waiting to meet his man. I kept my back to passing traffic. I looked straight up into the ceiling of an onion dome as tourists filed by. I heard Japanese. I heard German. When I heard Russian I fought the urge to glance back. I heard another following English-language group move in behind me.
When traffic finally died down, I sensed that someone was on my shoulder.
“You are easy to find,” he said. “You are still wearing the same clothes, no?”
I didn’t know whether to turn to face him or duck incoming fire or run. I chose the former because it would have been far too late for the others to get me out of a jam or even buy me time.
I turned and saw an immaculately turned-out gentleman, standing in an unfamiliar position: alone.
“My men are outside. They have gone through here already. They have seen who has come and who goes. Look.”
He pointed me to the narrow window. Through the stained glass I could see five formidable examples of Russian manhood stationed at the front of a line-up at the entrance to the church.
“You don’t have to worry.”
“If you’re happy, I’m happy, everyone’s happy,” I said. “Why do I have this feeling that I’ve gone a long way to get set up?”
I didn’t know what I had been set up for. I found it too gruesome to dwell on but I didn’t see the harm in mentioning it.
“This is no set-up. This is for a deal, of course. Business.”
“I like the irony, doing a deal with the devil here of all places,” I said, keeping my voice as low as I could.
Starshnikov’s English was solid. He had lots of practice following his daughter to Wimbledon, Flushing Meadow, and Melbourne. He had arranged for an English tutor for her so that the endorsement opportunities would come and he had studied too so that he’d come off looking good when the networks interviewed him at tournaments. He caught every last word I said. He didn’t have to play catch-up—he was working ahead of me.
“I have what you want, but I am not sure that I can give you him,” he said.
“You’re not sure you can or you’re not sure of the price?” That was a lesson Duke Avildsen taught me about Russia. He had dealings for players going back to the Soviet Union in its wind-down in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “Money,” he said. “You can get nothing without it and anything with a bag of it.”
“I’m not sure I can give you him,” he said. “Only that. I have a price.”
I broke down the numbers. “Look, if we buy Dmitrov out of his contract at the max, sixty-five percent, over the term, three years, he won’t be able to pay that out of his signing bonus,” I said. “Maybe he’s managed to put some money aside. Maybe a big agent will have that cash lying around and can advance him it against his future earnings. But this Salnikov, he wouldn’t have the cash on hand. If Dmitrov goes with the big agents, Ollie Buckhold, the agent that brought him to the draft, even Karl Beck, who has a bunch of big clients, they can get you your buyout money and…”
Starshnikov cut me off. I was getting way ahead of myself.
“Mister Shade, it is not so easy,” Starshnikov said. Now it was “Mister.” Bluster was out. Every word was measured. I wanted to believe him. “If it is so easy, we can talk in parking lot at arena and shake hands and everything done, easy. If it is only money, then I let him skate to you. I have no use for your money. It is not important to me. Not this amount.”
His disinterest in dollars would have made him the only man in hockey disposed that way. I was still working from Duke Avildsen’s Cash-Is-King playbook. Starshnikov let me know that Power Is King, Cash Is Just A Prince. He put me straight. We were dealing with an unholy third in this trinity.
“Mr. Shade, Dmitrov will not be mine to give,” he said.
“You own the team,” I said. “You can do whatever you want.”
“I own the team, yes, but I must do things a certain way. The man Dubinin I talked with.”
“Dubinin talked to you about getting a release for Dmitrov?” I asked. That one I wouldn’t have seen coming, Dubinin working on the square for L.A. Again I was getting way ahead of myself and way off track.
“Dubinin talked to me about Dmitrov, yes, but to America, no,” Starshnikov said. “It was his control.”
I was getting further lost. “Dmitrov’s control?” I asked.
“Dubinin’s control,” he said.
“And Dubinin said that he stays?” I asked. I was fogged in.
“Dubinin said that Dmitrov goes but not to America,” Starshnikov said. “Dubinin says that he must go to Moscow. A trade. He tells me I must do this one.”
A piece fell into place: the decision not to dress Dmitrov for games and hold him off ice at practice made sense. Whenever a team has a trade in deep in the works, at the Cross The T’s & Dot The I’s Stage, holding a player out of games is standard practice, eliminating the risk of an injury that could gum up a deal.
“What’s Dubinin’s interest in it?”
“It is national interest, he says. KHL changes its schedule for the Olympics. There is opportunity for players from KHL to practice and play together in times when there are no games in the league. Dmitrov, it is easier for him to go to national team training if he is with Dynamo. He will play with Olympic players with Dynamo, play for Olympic coach. Dubinin tells me that this is important. He tells me it is national planning and no team is more important than national planning.”
“You buy it?”
“It is maybe half, yes,” he said.
“Maybe, but I suspect that there’s more money in it for Dubinin that way too.”
“It is maybe second half, yes.”
“Did Dmitrov know all this was going on?” I asked.
“Dmitrov is a boy. No, he is not knowing everything. Dubinin told him that he is better in Moscow, not in Magnitogorsk or America, and Moscow wants him. Dubinin told him he is lucky.”
“And the kid says he doesn’t want to go.”
“This is correct thing. Dmitrov is young. He is not knowing everything, but he is knowing his heart. Mister Shade, he wants to go to your team. And Dubinin tells him he must go to Moscow. That this is for Olympics, Sochi. So that he can be hero of country, like Dubinin’s father. Like Dubinin too.”
“You have clout in the Kontinental Hockey League. Why can’t you just say no?”
“What is this, ‘clout’?’ ’
“Influence. The league listens to you. You’re one of the richest owners.”
“I am rich, yes, but Dynamo is powerful. They will always be powerful but maybe I’m not always rich, no?”
“Nothing’s certain in life,” I said.
“Here some people make life very much not certain at all.”
Starshnikov had put on an imperious, undefeated face in the parking lot of the arena. Likewise at courtside at Wimbledon he played the New-Age New-Money Russian Jet-Setter to the hilt. But here in the old cathedral, he forced a calm. He was spooked. Big time.
“I am sorry at the arena,” he said. “But I do this for my guards. They work for me, yes, but…”
“Everybody’s working for someone else,” I said. “Like Dubinin.”
“Dubinin, gone now but someone will come after,” the billionaire said.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Dubinin is alive as either of us.”
I have no idea what Starshnikov said but it sounded like Eb tvoju mat. His expression rendered translation unnecessary. I explained to him that I ran into Dubinin in the wee hours of the morning. I told him Dubinin might be limping, and his right arm might be in a sling.
“How?”
“It was staged.”
“What is ‘staged’?”
“Theatre.”
Starshnikov put it together.
“I hoped maybe, a new man comes, new from Dynamo, maybe listens to me…”
“Look, I share your disappointment,” I said. “But whether it’s Dubinin or someone coming in, it’s not going to make a big difference. Whoever comes on from Dynamo now is going to do what Dubinin would have. He might even be taking orders from Dubinin still, for all we know.”
Starshnikov tried to take it all in. He ran his thick fingers through hair that looked to have greyed since he came into the room.
“We walk,” he said and we wandered, into another room and then another, slowly, seemingly aimlessly, trying not to attract attention. We talked not much above a whisper, seemingly out of respect for the church, trying not to be overheard by strays dropped by their guided tours.
I checked for a tail. I turned back around and walked forward. There was a flash behind us and I jumped. I would have dropped to the mat and covered up, but I figured it wouldn’t have done me any good. I was there for the taking. I was ready to go peacefully.
I turned.
It was just a bunch of American tourists taking pix of the ancient icons, stuff that they’d throw up on their Facebook accounts when they made it back home. Somewhere some old biddy from Tuckahoe was going to post a shot of the back of my head and Starshnikov’s.
12
Starshnikov spilled it all as we walked. Some of it I knew, some of it was news to me. He said he had wealth he never had imagined and even he had trouble keeping track of it. He owned oil fields and copper and iron mines in Russia. He had parked money offshore, almost half of it. He docked a floating five-star hotel that he called a yacht in Malta. He was picking up the entire cost of Russia’s first attempt to win the America’s Cup. He was underwriting Russia’s national wrestling team to the tune of eight figures every year with absolutely nothing in return. “I don’t even ask for free ticket to tournament,” he said. These, of course, weren’t his only sporting interests. He had a talented and drop-dead gorgeous daughter, who owned the London tabs at Wimbledon the last two summers. That had something to do with the fact that he was branching out into media companies and had acquired a minority stake in the Daily Sun. His wife had died young and he had raised his daughter as a single parent, albeit one with a personal staff that would earn his household Michelin’s highest ranking.
“All of this,” he said, “and I can lose it all.”
He said the warning signs were out there for Russia’s newest billionaires. “A new way,” he called it. Examples were made of those who tried to go another way.
“Early with Putin, ten years ago, we who have new money learn a lesson from Khodorkovsky. He supports opposition in election and he goes to prison. He is still there. Something we must think about. But now another, his name is Lebedev, he is charged for nothing and he can go to jail for five years. For nothing.”
“He can’t get out of the country?”
“No,” Starshnikov said. “Is impossible.”
“So you keep your nose clean,” I said.
If he didn’t get the intended meaning he still got the spirit.
“Is more difficult now,” he said. “Soon there will be law…it allows not so much investment out of Russia. Putin wants to keep Russian wealth in nation. First he tells government officials that they must not have foreign bank accounts anymore. It is popular thing for people because of government corruption, they think. But this is the start and it will be like Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. We will have to sell investments outside Russia and bring them here. We will have to sell investments outside Russia to buyers Kremlin approves…”
“…and the boys at the Kremlin have their hooks in the prospective buyers.”
“Is exactly this. Then when we bring our gold back to Russia, it is not ours. Here what is our wealth can be taken by state. And if it can be taken…”
“It’s a matter of when, not if,” I said and then rephrased for easier understanding. “If they can take it, someday they will. If you have a hammer, everyone looks like a nail.”
“This is the future,” he said.
“And you don’t want it to be your future.”
“This to become my future if I stay and do something they do not like,” he said. “And Dmitrov must go to Dynamo even if I do not like it. He wishes to leave Russia to go to America. But if he goes, I have problem. Maybe government says I can’t travel. And if I can’t, maybe they look for other things, no? Maybe I am in prison cells with men who were rich and now have nothing.”
“You want to be out of Russia sooner rather than later?” I said.
He nodded.
“Me too,” I said. “What’s it worth to you?”
I imagined it was a shitload more than a nineteen-year-old hockey player, but that was a start.
13
“I got a call from Chief,” Hunts said. Chief is our western scout. “Chief said he got a call out of the blue from Kelly Markham.”
I was on Ivan’s phone. I didn’t want to run the power charge down and the long-distance bill up on my own. Ivan had started the car up but had not pulled out of his parking spot three blocks from Red Square. I hadn’t told Ivan about our next stop, but I was sure he was hoping he’d be dropping me off somewhere, never to see me again.
“Maybe it’s about the scouts’ golf tournament after the draft,” I said, knowing that this wasn’t the case. The tournament had been discontinued a few years back when, at the commissioner’s urging, Galvin and other owners decided to cut their scouting budgets to the bone and eliminated anything considered a non-essential expenditure.
“Chief doesn’t golf,” Hunts said. “What’s that about?”
“I dunno.”
“Is he fishing ’round for a job?”
“Maybe. Don’t worry. He wasn’t calling Chief to do a check of my references.”
“Maybe that’s something you should think about, Shadow.”
“I hate to cut this short, Hunts, but I’m a little pressed for time.”
“I sorta got that. Markham told Chief that you’re off the radar and some heavies brought him in for questioning because they said he had been seen with you around the hotel and the arena. Said he was lucky that they didn’t beat the shit out of him or throw him in jail. He went to the American Embassy. Called Chief from there. I got no idea why he’d use that one phone call to call Chief.”
I did but I wasn’t going into it with Hunts.
Marks was an intermittently single guy and this was one of those high-and-dry spells, so he had no significant other to call.
He couldn’t call Ivan because he knew that if traced, and there’d be a good chance of that, it would have led the FSB right to me.
Marks couldn’t dial up his bastard GM in Vancouver and tell him he had been pinched and grilled by the FSB. His smarmy boss would be no different than those who interrogated Marks: he’d presume Marks guilty even if there was cold, hard proof of his innocence.
Marks couldn’t call the Markham clan’s consigliere, who was well-acquainted with the family’s black sheep and tired of him. If Marks wanted help from the house shark and his partners, the $1,500 an hour was going to have to be authorized by the patriarch.
Marks couldn’t call the patriarch. He had been told it was the last time a dozen times before.
And Marks couldn’t call me.
That left Chief, our scout based in Regina, a guy Marks crossed paths with on almost a nightly basis during the season. Marks’s old man had been active in charities for Native Americans in the Dakotas. He had set up and paid for the operating costs for a school for Lakota kids and he had asked Marks to try to get some native players and ex-players involved, even if just to come down to speak to the kids. Chief was one of them.
Marks went to Chief, knowing he’d go to Hunts, knowing I’d get to Hunts at some point if for nothing else to remind him that, in these stressful times, he’s the executor of my will.
“Markham called Chief probably ’cause he knew I lost my phone the other night, I guess,” I said, carving out a plausible scenario.
Markham wasn’t making a 911 call when he called up Chief. He knew that there was nothing that Chief or Hunts or the team or even the league could do to put out all the fires burning around me. I knew it was just Marks’s way of warning me that the FSB were out trying to find me and extinguish those fires with kerosene.
Hunts and I talked some more. I didn’t bother him with all the details.
14
Ivan dropped me at the Ritz-Carlton and told me that he’d wait in a nearby café. Even though I looked haggard, the security detail outside waved me through when I said that I had an appointment with a guest. They didn’t understand a word of it but knew I was speaking English and thought foreigners wouldn’t be crazy enough to try anything out of line. Just as we vastly underrate them, so too do they vastly underrate us.
