The third man in, p.25
The Third Man In, page 25
I had no idea what Prokorov was trying to do. I thought we weren’t six inches closer to finding this one lonely guy in a city of twelve million. For all I knew, Prokorov could have been running me around or even getting the word out to his friends that he had roped in some American fool. I was pissed, less about the money than the waste of time.
“Da,” the Hipster said just before I was going to shake him until my money fell out of his pockets. He pulled out his iPhone and called a number. I thought it was a stall but I let it play out. He put the phone on speaker. One call went straight to voicemail and he didn’t leave his name or number. Another call rang twenty times without a pick-up or message. And that’s how it went with five more numbers that he keyed in. Again, he volunteered no explanations. Just when I was going to blow the whole thing up, someone at last answered his call.
“Da.” The voice on the other end was that of a muzzled pit bull with strep throat.
Prokorov spoke quickly.
A couple of words came in a hoarse reply and then the call cut out.
“We go,” he said.
And we did. It was more than an hour before closing but it didn’t matter to him. He powered down the cash register, signed out of the system, turned off the lights, set the alarm, and locked the door. He moved through the routine at warp speed and kept up the pace as we set off on foot toward Red Square.
“Is man we must see,” he said. “Is not much time. We have hour and then none for days, yes.”
Ten minutes later we were outside Ploshchad Revolyutsii, the Revolution Square Metro Station.
Prokorov pointed at a bronze statue of a soldier on one knee beside his dog. “We must rub the dog’s nose,” he said. “Is custom of Moscow. Is luck.”
We didn’t have time to spare but my tour guide insisted. We joined a long line of Muscovites. All looked like they really needed a lucky break, and none looked like the dog had ever come through for them before. The kid rubbed it and I followed suit. I’m one of the least superstitious guys ever to play in the league, but I was willing to make an exception. I thought the soldier sorta looked like Sarge and the dog was a match for Larry, the German shepherd my old man adopted when both of them retired after years of decorated service. But that’s another story.
21
When we pulled into the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Station, I followed Prokorov out the door of the train. I felt a forearm shiver across my lower back that almost knocked me over. The forearm that shivered me belonged to a fat woman in a babushka. The Would-be Action-Movie Auteur yanked me by the arm down to the far end of the platform. We were swimming against the current of Muscovites flowing to the escalator. One guy was walking with a five-foot length of copper pipe scavenged from a worksite or demolition job and almost took my head off with it. Thankfully, he turned it from diagonal to upright when I was passing. Suitable for pipe bombs, I thought.
Those arriving with us cleared the platform in a hurry. Twenty seconds later the platform started to refill. Another twenty seconds and it was shoulder-to-shoulder mayhem.
“Trains come always sixty seconds, very fast,” Prokorov said. Nothing else. No clue to where we were going. I wanted to ask him WTF but I didn’t have a chance.
A train roared in on schedule. A newspaper blew up almost chest high and I batted it down. Another wave flowed out onto the platform. All were looking down at their shoes, assiduously avoiding unwanted eye contact, none even glancing at us in their rush to the exits. I watched the commuters disappear into the distance as the train took off. And I watched as passengers on the other side of the platform boarded a train and cleared the deck completely. I watched them a little too long. The next thing I felt was my right arm being pulled and a sense of weightlessness. Prokorov had a tight hold on my jacket and jumped off the platform and onto the tracks seven feet below. I heard him say something but it was muffled, drowned out by a train pulling away on the other set of tracks. I could have broken my back but I landed on my front, got my hands up and rolled. I know about the anesthetizing effect of a decent dose of adrenaline. Playing two periods with a broken wrist in the playoffs taught me all about that. I hurt something landing on the tracks, but I was going to have to take inventory later. I was on a dead run in a second. I saw Prokorov running into the tunnel. It would have been a scramble to climb back up on the platform. I gave chase. Somewhere in that tunnel an oncoming train was roaring to an appointment in half a minute or so.
It was black. It was loud, getting louder. Even the train echoing in the distance didn’t drown out what I figured to be the last hundred or so beats of my heart. I didn’t have time for life to pass in front of my eyes. I stopped thirty yards into the gloom, the exact point where I thought I could turn around and maybe, maybe, get back to the platform. I was snapped out of brain lock by another pull on my arm and I wasn’t about to fight it off.
“We are here,” Prokorov said.
His arm was stretched across my chest, not that I needed any encouragement to press my back against the wall in a recess in the tunnel. The train roared by within an arm’s length.
“Have you done this before?” I asked.
Prokorov ignored the question. “He works down here…don’t know what you say in English…is work.”
It could have been construction, maintenance, engineering, or something else. Either way, it was going to have to wait.
Another train roared by. And another. And another. Each one threw up the same clouds of dust and dirt, and I tried to filter it through the sleeve of my jacket. The dim interior lights from the cars faintly illuminated us. We would have been blurry ghosts. I was worried that a sharp-eyed passenger would spot us, but I got over it by the time the fifth train passed. No one was going to the authorities with a sighting that could have been a long-suppressed memory. Nothing happened.
It took four minutes for my heart rate to slow enough that my shaking was manageable. Claustrophobia was kicking in. We were like two soldiers pinned in a bunker, good for as long we stood our ground, good so long as we didn’t move six inches forward and with no place to move back.
“What the fuck are we doing here?”
“He comes.”
“He does? Who the fuck is ‘he’?”
“He looks for them for police, yes.”
“Them? Who is ‘them’?”
“They live here and they go to jail, yes?”
I tried to piece it together. I would have got his meaning more quickly if I hadn’t been rattled from toenails to scalp. Prokorov was talking about the two classes that overlap: criminals and the homeless. Instead of leaving Moscow to go on the lam, professional criminals bear down through the loam and into the bedrock, embedding underground until the heat is off them. They blend in with the homeless who go underground for shelter and to avoid authorities. Within Moscow’s city limits this overlap between these two groups is absolute: homelessness is in and of itself a crime. Those of No Fixed Address land in the can, where cops and guards kick the shit out of them. Once the sport of that fades for the thuggish custodians of order and the blood, bruises, and moans start to bore them, they drive the homeless out past the city limits and drop them on a desolate steppe. This passes for Russia’s social safety net.
Markov’s job was to find trespassers and roust them. Their crimes would be determined once they were in custody. Markov was comfortable down in the city’s entrails as the Lone Ranger riding the open range.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“We must not find him…we wait…he finds us.”
“You said this was going to be an hour.”
“They are late is all. We wait.”
We waited. And waited. I managed to take a piss, a stream against the side of a passing train. I apologized to Prokorov when he was spritzed on the rebound.
Thirty trains roared by before I saw in the distance what looked like a small swarm of fireflies that had flown into the tunnel. Five trains after that I heard the echo of voices. The voices were drowned out every minute by the metronomic roar of passing trains. Five more minutes of slow advance up the tracks and it became clear that the echoes were hoarse shouts at their source and that source seemed to be a single overused voice. Finally, I could see faint outlines of stony faces under the lights on the top of hard hats and arms and hands at the end of flashlights. The sight of the lights, like the sound of the voices, paused every minute. Whoever held the lights was, like us, ducking into a narrow safe zone when a train closed in. Whoever it was knew the nooks and crannies where they would be safe and where their criminal quarry lurked. A few more minutes and trains passed. Our meeting with our man was upon us, I thought. My optimism faded to black when the lights on their hard hats and flashlights brought into uncomfortable view the drawn guns they wielded.
We were playing to a tough crowd.
The miners’ lights were shining down on us as we stood petrified with our backs to the Metro’s wall. These three boys had to have almost four inches on me. After all the time in the tunnel, my pupils were the size of pucks, so their lights practically blinded me. From what little I could make out, they were wearing industrial green. I wasn’t about to upbraid them for being tardy for our appointment. It seemed wise to let it slide.
The voice that finally spoke to us came from an unlit fourth behind them. His was the lone voice I had heard as they had come up the tracks.
I had to leave the talking to Prokorov, but for a guy who was looking at a pointed gun he seemed to be a little too casual for my comfort and health. A little desperation would have been appropriate, but I was in no position to interrupt or prod him. We had thirty seconds until the next train was going to run by us. I thought these guys could have punted us down onto the tracks and would have if they weren’t responsible for cleaning up the mess.
I felt sweat running down my back, even though I could still see my breath.
The voice stepped in front of the muscle. It belonged to a guy more than a head shorter than the members in his posse, the guy in the clipping that had run through the copier back at the photo shop. Markov stepped up on the ledge beside me. I hadn’t quite become inured to guns drawn on me and they’ve always brought out My Inner Pacifist.
Our social director barked out orders and the crew wordlessly followed them. The boys pushed My Fellow Found-In and me down the ledge, toward the oncoming train, and through a narrow opening. It led to an even narrower maintenance workers’ walkway that ran between the two tracks, a corridor that was carpeted with empty vodka bottles. If my guide on this tour had known about this line of access, we could have been spared some time Cheating Death inches from the trains at the side of the tracks.
I was all about compliance but I still took a couple of knocks in the back of the head. I turned and saw that Prokorov was making his way unmolested. He was in what looked like casual conversation with Markov. He enjoyed Preferred-Prisoner Status. The idea that this kid had gamed me tied my gut in a knot. I heard a train coming up the track. The boys hustled me up to a ladder at the end of the platform.
I looked back at Prokorov when I was at the top rung. “Why the fuck did we have to jump?” I said. “This isn’t a movie.”
22
My escorts dropped me into a hardback wooden chair that was Joe Stalin vintage. The relic fit right in with the rest of the décor of the office tucked beneath an escalator and beside a broom closet at the Biblioteka Station on the Sokolnicheskaya line, the original dig. The room probably hadn’t changed much since the first train rolled down the track: a simple, grey metal desk, a filing cabinet, a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling from a low ceiling. At least it seemed like a hundred watts, my pupils feeling like they were never going to return to their normal size.
It had occurred to me that Prokorov was in cahoots with Markov back in the tunnel. The idea was taking root when my hired hand walked into the room and leaned against the grey concrete walls while I was in the hot seat. He looked down at his shoes, avoiding eye contact with me, his face still not creased by worry.
The Mole Man took a seat opposite me. He stared me in the eye and didn’t blink, a complete deadpan. Without turning his head, Markov asked Prokorov three questions and got three very brief answers. Markov then told the big boys to take a powder. They walked out the door and he shut it behind them.
The Mole Man and I were locked in a staring contest. I didn’t turn my head when Prokorov spoke. “I’ll translate,” he said. “Go slow.”
And I did, one sentence at a time, with a pause to let my fixer try to get some sort of meaning across.
“I’m looking for a man who disappeared into the Metro. Into the tunnels at Lubyanka Station.”
No change in expression.
“I think he is living down here. He gets off the train but doesn’t go up the escalator to street level.”
Markov blinked.
“His name is Dubinin. He is the one who is supposed to have died in the bombing this week. He didn’t. Someone else was the victim.”
He looked down at his watch.
“Dubinin killed a young player. Then he staged his own death. Now he’s planning to leave Russia. Escape Russia.”
I enhanced the narrative. Made it my own. Made it appeal to a once-wronged man’s sense of justice. Made it rouse his dormant idealism.
“Dubinin is trying to escape prosecution. He’s leaving Russia with money that belongs to his wife and children. He is leaving them behind.”
Okay, I torqued the narrative. Yes, there was a wife, I told Markov. And I told him that Dubinin didn’t have children with her but he had bragged about other women in other countries and illegitimate spawn from various international affairs.
I needed him to envy Dubinin, then to resent Dubinin, and finally to hate Dubinin. I felt like I was getting there.
“I saw him alone on a car, the first train, Sunday morning. Alone in the last car. He left the car at Lubyanka Station. I didn’t see him on the platform. I lost him.”
When Prokorov was through the translation, Markov nodded once. That was all. He didn’t give me the stop sign. I went on:
“He had to have jumped onto the tracks off the back door of the train,” I said.
The Mole Man studied me. No reaction. I had to take my swing.
“I thought he might have an FSB connection, especially having played with Dynamo, but I doubted he would have if he had been using the Metro and not the…”
I stopped and waited for Prokorov to look up from his shoes and over at me. When he did I made air quotes, not sure if that meant anything in Moscow.
“…‘special Metro line for important people.’ ”
Markov interrupted.
“Yes, I speak some English, I study it in university, not often speak now.”
I exhaled. Not that his limited command of the language was going to make the search easier or even possible, but I thought it might speed things along.
“Yes,” he said. “It is possible he is FSB, yes, leaving train on Lubyanka. We work on Sokolnicheskaya…”
Markov stopped and switched over to Russian and spoke to Prokorov. The kid then gave me the rundown in full.
“They build the old line of Metro-2 many years ago…when Sokolnicheskaya opens…He says now needs repair on old line, faster trains, security…Metro-2 is working other lines in city…closed some hours, morning, late night. Months for this.”
I visualized a timetable and a map. Dubinin had taken the Metro because he just happened to be in transit in those hours when the work crews were working on the secret line.
“So he can go from the Metro station to offices at the Toy Store,” Prokorov said.
“Toy store?” I said.
“Toy Store is name people make KGB offices many years past, yes. Lubyanka. Offices across the road from national toy store. I still have small truck from time as boy.”
The Soviets’ fine sense of irony in play once again, I thought.
“He goes there for work?” I said.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But is possible they have…what you call, where to hide and protect?”
“Safe house? Refuge? Hideout.”
“Yes, is this,” he said.
“Many places he can go,” the Mole Man said, “but maybe some cannot go to because…”
Again, another torrent of Russian to Prokorov, who took it all in and then read it back to me. “Someone can’t go to place on Metro-2 when the line is under construction now, they make plan more security, when there are bombs, the terrorist.”
That might have seemed to make no sense, unless you bought the official narrative that a couple of Chechen women became suicide bombers for the cause when Lubyanka Station was bombed. On further review, though, in a chess match with false narrative playing white and cold reality playing black, an opening gambit of a staged bombing with blame laying at the feet of the Chechens might be the catalyst, just the thing to prompt the Chechens to copycat and do it up in a more ambitious and more murderous way.
“Many places this man can go,” Markov said. “In underground from Lubyanka, not the Metro.”
He paused and then turned to Prokorov, just a few words.
“Is like apartment or hotel with tunnels from Lubyanka, the main building,” the kid said.
“Would your men have seen him early in the morning?” I asked Markov directly.
“Men go in Sokolnicheskaya line when close, finish checking 5 A.M.”
“So none of them would have seen him come in or know where he is,” I said.
“This I cannot tell you, no,” Markov said.
With that he stood up and opened the door. I walked out but he shut the door before Prokorov left. They had a muted discussion, barely within my earshot and out of the security crew’s.
Five minutes passed and I wondered if I was cleared to leave. Finally, the kid emerged without a goodbye or glance back at the Mole Man. He walked. I followed. Markov’s mouth-breathers stood there like they were marble from the neck down.
