The third man in, p.27
The Third Man In, page 27
I fought the urge to say more. I didn’t want to in any way implicate her or make her think a helluva lot less of me. I did want to amend the record, though. I had a parting gift for her, a reason to think good thoughts about me, maybe a reason to call me or invite me for a nightcap.
“I’ll go back but I’m getting Dmitrov out of here,” I told her.
And I told her how. It was a much bigger story and I told her it on my terms: an embargo to save jobs, mine foremost, and lives, ditto.
вторник
TUESDAY
1
He had borrowed a friend’s ride, a boxy, dented GAZ that had been a taxi for ten years before it rolled into exhausted semi-retirement. He was ready for a vigil from midnight to dawn: a full tank of gas to keep idling for heat all night and a flask of gut-rot vodka in case the heater failed. Before we headed out, I had explained to him through his translator that we’d need to stay sober and we’d need luck, one element common to successful stakeouts and stalkings. We caught a break right off the hop.
I powered up my iPhone. Battery full. I flipped to the third page of apps. I tapped the icon on the top row and crossed my fingers, hoping my team-issued iPhone hadn’t been found and had slipped down to the bottom of Anastasia’s purse. And hoping it wasn’t yet out of juice. It had been fully charged twenty-four hours ago when I planted it. It had been connected to the network. And it still was. Still sending out a signal.
The Where’s My iPhone app took its own sweet time but it gave me the choice of devices. Not my personal iPhone. Holding it. Not my computer. Still where I left it, on a night-stand, connected to the Marriott’s wi-fi. No, I was looking for my latest entry on my Apple account, my new team-issued iPhone. It was third on the scroll. I tapped it and seconds later a compass came up and then a Moscow street grid along with it. I enlarged it. I showed it to Igor’s owner. He gave me a double take. He must have thought it strange that I was able to offer millions to young players but couldn’t invest in a handheld that wasn’t cracked to smithereens. Then he grabbed it and took a closer look. He recognized the street names. The GAZ rolled.
Anastasia wasn’t at the Boar’s Head. She had apparently decided against one final victory lap of the bar. She wasn’t in the building where I had spotted Dubinin the night before, either. No surprise that Dubinin would have sought a change of venue. He’d have been spooked by my appearance out of the thin blue ether. The app indicated that Dubinin’s lovely had checked into a modernist townhouse a couple of blocks from the other love nest. The lights were on and the curtains drawn, which suggested that someone was home and that she hadn’t just left the purse behind and gone with another handbag that night. Just a Maybe-Maybe.
We waited silently in the car. There could be no words. Even if we could think of something to say, we had no way of saying it. I looked at the map on the app and moved it around, picking out the landmarks. All I could make out was an icon for the nearest Metro station.
We waited with eyes wide. There could be no sleep, no distractions. We were looking not only for Dubinin, who might be there or not, but also for anyone who might have Dubinin’s flank and would be looking for me.
We didn’t know when he would come and when he would go. We didn’t even know if he would come at all. We did know where we had a chance to take him, though.
We were ready to put in hours. It was minutes.
Dubinin didn’t arrive. He must have beaten us there. At the time we expected to see him walking in the door, he was walking out of it. It was 12:35 A.M. Rather than sitting on him for hours, we were going to have to chase him to keep up. Dubinin was limping in the direction of the Metro. He had to be thinking of that hoof to the knee with every twinge. It was a six-minute walk. He had a couple of minutes to spare to make the booze cruise, the last train of the night on the original line.
“Lubyanka,” I said. “Go.”
I grabbed him by the sleeve and pointed. While the wreck was idling, it sputtered every minute or so and I was worried about it stalling. No need. He threw it into gear and had my head snapping when he floored it.
Through his translator, I had told the shooter about seeing Dubinin at Lubyanka. I had filled in details about the last car, about an entrance to Metro-2, FSB headquarters and, maybe, something like Dubinin’s subterranean Fortress of Solitude. I drew a rough map of the platform. I had laid it out for the translator and the man on the mission: Dubinin could be taken where I had spotted him and I thought there’d be a good chance, maybe as high as fifty percent, that he’d be getting off at the same stop, even the same car. Dubinin didn’t know how I had found him that morning when we scrapped. The bastard had no reason to think I had spotted him going through that routine Sunday morning on the Metro and I hadn’t given him any reason to suspect that I had any idea about the address of his home away from home. Of course he’d give me no credit at all. Why should I have been any different than anyone else?
2
I was standing on the platform and biting my lip. Arthur was still throbbing and burning from the run from the GAZ double-parked a block away. I checked the time on my iPhone. 12:48. 12:49. The Metro shuts down at 1 A.M., when the last trains leave the endpoints of the shorter lines and the security detail closes the entrances by dropping a metal barrier from the ceiling.
The last southeast-bound train came first and left abruptly, its doors opening and snapping shut, leaving barely a breath in between. Foot traffic was light. The area around the station was a business and government district and it was a home destination to almost no one except those of us staying in hotels. And except for me, those guests wouldn’t be reckless enough to be loitering in the Metro in the dead of night.
My accomplice was manning the back end of that platform, watching to see if Dubinin was exiting out the back of the last northwest-bound train. All he saw is what I saw: a few kids, not quite in their twenties, drunk and sloppy, stumbling onto the platform to rubber-leg it to clubs nearby. The guys pushed each other, pretending to fight. The girls looked on tolerantly. I was worried that it could turn into something. Half the play-fights in the world turn into the real thing and I imagine that when you factor in drunken Russian youths at 1 A.M. that percentage is somewhat higher. Everything I had worked out could have spun out right then and there; just one stray Metro rider could have blown up the plans. I wanted the deck to clear and fast, no reason to have security stick around to sweep up the garbage. I wanted no witnesses. One turned head, one sidelong look, anything even close to a spookable moment and it was all off and over with.
I was giving the whole thing about a five percent chance of coming off.
With on- and off-load to the south, we managed to avoid tripping the wire. We loitered. No eye contact with passers-by. At a time and in a place where everyone is suspect and considered a potential perpetrator or victim or both, we were able to stay inconspicuously inconspicuous. No hiding behind newspapers or anything like that.
I stood on the platform about four doors from the back of the last northeast-bound train and looked at the arch of the ceiling above the tracks. All the beautiful stations in the Metro, the Art Deco architecture, the statues, the huge mosaics, but Dubinin had stayed closest to his home, Lubyanka. The station’s walls are a plain, dull white. Like a slaughterhouse, I thought. And just as the train roar came up the tunnel, I thought about the boys from the FSB hosing the blood of the bombing victims off these walls.
I looked into the windows of the cars as they rolled by. I tried to make out faces to see if Dubinin had not boarded in his usual spot, a possibility. Those at the front were a blur, like trying to pick out faces in a video on fast forward. As the train braked, they became easier to make out. And when it jerked to a complete stop, I had my back to the last car but could make it out of the corner of my right eye.
I saw Dubinin get off. Rather than exiting out of the back service door as he had when I spotted him that morning, he took a casual approach and exited out the door to the platform like any other rider on the Metro. No jump out the back door. Dubinin then headed toward the ladder down to the tracks at the end of the platform. Either he didn’t want to muss his hair or the knee was too dicey for the jump, or both.
I started to walk toward the escalator as if I had just gotten off the train myself. And at the foot of the escalator, Igor and owner were waiting for me. I gave the nod. I stepped onto the escalator and my winger started to the back of the platform to tail Dubinin. My winger walked by me unsteadily. He almost fell as he hurried. He reeked of vodka. He didn’t look at me. His expression was as blank your average corpse’s.
Maybe he’d catch him. Maybe he wouldn’t find him. Maybe he’d hit a door that Dubinin would lock behind him. Maybe nothing would happen at all and he wouldn’t make it to ground level before they dropped the Iron Curtain on him. Maybe I’d never know how this would turn out. Maybe I shouldn’t have stuck around to find out. But it wasn’t just about hockey, not just about me. It was about Lanny. I had to know.
3
Up on the street I took a deep breath and freckled my lungs with frost. I pulled the hood of my coat over my head and buried my hands in my pockets. Cars roared by and the wind howled, but I couldn’t hear much at all. My pulse throbbed in my ears.
The scene played out in a muffled rhythm in my world but in more brutal percussion for my confederate. Three beefy guys with yellow subway-security vests dragged him up out to the curb. One guy put a boot to his ass and another gave him a kick in the ribs, but he showed some presence of mind covering his head with his hands and arms as best he could. He groaned but didn’t speak, probably thinking that any pleading would have invited more blows. He stayed still while they frisked him, looking for any loose rubles for drinking. As they expected, they found nothing. He had to have ditched Igor. Wouldn’t have been hard in a subway tunnel. Coming up empty-handed pissed them off and jump-started the beat-down. Each took a couple of kicks, just hard enough to break ribs or collapse a lung, but the boys tired of the game. It was cold, this was the end of their shift, and they had worked up a thirst. One produced a bottle from his vest and they casually walked away, leaving just another vagrant for dead.
I surveyed the scene. No one was watching. Even if someone had been watching, the lump of flesh on the pavement could have passed for a common drunk. On the streets of Moscow minutes shy of 2 A.M., they are not common so much as ubiquitous. Some would have presumed he was one of the homeless. Those who gave him the benefit of the doubt would have filled in blanks: he looked like someone who had lost a job, pushing a broom maybe, and had taken his frustrations out working down to the bottom of a bottle.
A young couple walked by him and didn’t look down. I waited until they were down the block.
I went over to him. I was a foreigner, a tourist, so if a cop came along I could pass for a dim-witted Good Samaritan.
He was breathing and he was awake. He also wasn’t drunk. He smelled like one but that was just for effect. He had splashed the gut-rot vodka all over his face and clothes like a hooker would douse herself with cheap perfume. Only enough to fool fools. I helped him to his knees. It took a minute, nothing more. He stumbled off. He gained speed. He leaned forward and his legs tried to catch up. He spat blood on the sidewalk and left a red streak on his sleeve when he wiped his broken nose.
He walked away from Lubyanka Square and down narrow streets lined with FSB offices and storefronts. I gave him a head start and then fell in behind him by twenty steps. I didn’t want to walk beside him, not right away. We had a game plan for the act but not the aftermath. Didn’t discuss it. Only the act mattered.
He gave no sign that the deed had been done. He gave no sign that it hadn’t. No worry. No remorse. No satisfaction. No frustration. No smile. No scowl. Beneath the cuts and bruises and swelling and radiating out from the broken nose was the deadest of deadpans. A minute and a block passed and nothing. Finally, he ducked into an alley to the loading docks of a warehouse stocked with imported auto parts. He spat blood again, grabbed his ribs, and brushed by a young couple making out to stay warm. I was engrossed by them for a couple of seconds but he didn’t even seem to notice.
I’m generally a percentage player but circumstances and, yeah, history, long past and recent, pushed me to take my own reckless chances: I was with a guy who had carried a gun into the subway, who may or may not have killed someone, who might have wanted me dead for knowing either that he did it or that he had tried and failed. For all I knew, the beating could have been staged. For all I knew, he might have been setting me up, taking me to a secluded place where the FSB would be waiting for me, where even Dubinin might have been standing. But I’m a student of human nature. I saw this guy’s motives as simple, not complex. I saw everything about this guy the same way.
He snapped me out of the escalation of paranoid ruminations. He grabbed my arm, pulled me into a doorway, and waved his thick right fist in my face. He wasn’t threatening me. He was offering his mitt up as evidence: a sweet aroma, a heady mix of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur, too strong for a single round or even two. He then gave me a playful shove and with it a good reason to take off and ditch this leather coat before getting back to the hotel just in case anyone checked me for powder.
I nodded. At least he had tried to get the job done. I was good to go and I started to walk back out to the street but he grabbed me by the arm again.
He reached down in the front of his pants to his crotch and pulled out what looked like an iPhone but was some type of Russian-made knockoff. The police weren’t going to frisk him down there. With a stubby trigger finger hitting the screen twice he pulled up a gallery of photos. He did this as casually as he might have pulled out snapshots from a birthday party. He touched the screen again to stretch out into plain view his favourite in the gallery: a photo of Dubinin, his ruined features whited out by the flash. It took me a second or two to recognize that face without the smug smile. He would have been disappointed if he could have seen his hair mussed. All the treatments at the spa, all the shots of Botox and testosterone couldn’t have animated that face.
I was lost in thought for an awful and beautiful second. I CGIed the scene in my mind: as Dubinin’s central nervous system started to short out, he would have had a second of clarity. He wouldn’t have thought of a loved one. He had none really. He might have thought of the cheapness of his own life or someone else’s. Maybe, if he lasted so much as a panted breath, he would have been tortured by the irony that someone who had devalued life was having his own discounted to a couple of kopecks. Did he recognize the shooter or was it too dark in the tunnel? Did he plead for his life or die instantly? Unanswerable or at least there was no asking The Shooter. It didn’t matter. I allowed myself a split-second reverie: Dubinin dying a slow, painful death, what would have been the just outcome for the suffering he caused.
The Shooter then reached into his crotch again. He had collected souvenirs. He showed me Dubinin’s wallet. I was getting nervous standing in this one place too long and, even though it was a little late in the game, looked around for security cameras. He tugged at my sleeve again and pulled the money out of Dubinin’s wallet. He seemed neither pleased nor disappointed with his bounty. Walk-around cash for Dubinin on the eve of his flight to Austria was The Shooter’s lottery win. He kept rooting around the wallet’s folds and in the detritus he found a tiny pin, triangle-shaped with a script D, the Dynamo crest. I imagined he had earned it when he was a kid. Maybe Dubinin thought of it on his fadeout, his Rosebud.
I tried to get across to The Shooter the idea that he should delete the photos stat, even if I was sorely tempted to ask him to send me copies so that I could post them on Facebook. Possible caption: “It looks serious, so sorry.” I grabbed his phone out of his hands, found the Photos icon, and trashed them.
I pointed to a trashcan in another alley across the street and let The Shooter know that he should pitch the wallet and everything in it before we walked past the horny kids and back out into the street. He wiped out the photos after one last look and he threw the wallet in the trash. I made sure that it was good and buried beneath paper and frozen scraps of food. When I put the lid back on the can I looked at him and saw that he had kept one souvenir: the Dynamo pin. He was sticking it to the collar of his coat as if he were just a fan of the team. And finally he smiled. What looked like a show of loyalty couldn’t have been more ironic, his delicious stealth show of a kill on a hidden battlefield. Dubinin never imagined that his keepsake would end up there, like one of those silhouettes painted on the side of fighter planes in the old days.
4
I pointed south toward Red Square, the general direction of the Marriott. He shrugged and nodded and so we started walking. This time I took the lead. I walked ten yards ahead of him, maybe a bit more. If he fell too far behind, I took a second to check out the street signs. If he was walking beside me that might raise suspicions. It simply looked like a Russian street drunk, tailing a foreign mark for the mugging. Nothing suspicious there.
I took a last look back at Lubyanka, at the spot where a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the KGB’s founder, had stood. Iron Felix, they called it. If he hadn’t been torn down back in those heady days in the early ’90s, he would have shed little metal tears if he had been told of the death of a company man a couple of hundred feet beneath his iron boots.
We had taken the long way back to the borrowed car, not wanting to get too close to Lubyanka Station. At one point we had all eighteen lanes of the Tervaskaya to cross. We took the underpass that tens of thousands bustle through every day. Now we saw tiny shadows in the distance, people minding their own business, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if their business was as dark as ours. We walked past the kiosks, hundreds of tiny stores, glass floor-to-ceiling interrupted only by sliding portals, where rubles are passed and smokes and bottles and snacks are passed back. I wanted to get back to the hotel, get packed, and get on with getting on a plane to get home, safe in the knowledge that my job and a bit of justice had been done.
