The third man in, p.3
The Third Man In, page 3
I splashed cold water on my face and gave my head a shake in front of the bathroom mirror. I rooted through my carry-on for my Celebrex, a thrice-daily candy for My Now Lifelong Friend Arthur, the guy with the lifetime lease in my aching knee.
I checked my text messages: nothing from Dubinin.
I checked my work phone’s voicemail, though the outcome wasn’t in doubt. Nada. The iPhone 6 was charged up, so I plugged in my antique personal unit and charged the external battery off my laptop.
I checked my email, skipping over random stuff from my scouting staff, injured prospects, suspensions, logistical shit.
I cracked open a couple of texts from my daughter, Lanny. She was in her second year at Princeton, trying to wrest a degree out of the business school and the starting job from the senior goaltender who had carried the team to the NCAA semis the year before. Thank God, My Little Princess had landed a full ride and saved me the cost of tuition, residence, and goalie pads. She was letting me know she was low on pocket money.
I’m only going by what you always told me…you have to eat like a pro to play like a pro.
Her mother, the X, was “reading scripts” as she had been for going on three years now, more like a librarian than an actress. Her revenue stream was down to the occasional Comic-Con–style nostalgia show, where she would sign and personalize 8”-by-10” glossies of her former self. I was holding out hope that the America’s Sweetheart Turned Tabloid Train Wreck was going to get a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice. Until then, I had to cover Lanny’s expenses.
I opened an email, this one salutation-free, from Sarge, my old man.
Are you sure you’re back for charity game? And we need some of your friends to help too. I don’t want to look bad.
He was all wound up because a guy he used to coach on the cop hockey team had been racked up when a drunk kid slammed into the cruiser he was standing beside, radar gun in hand, on the Bayview Extension. Aird had his pension to look forward to but nothing else. Two of his vertebrae were just so much dust. He was going to need a ramp to get wheeled in and out of his digs. His wife had bailed on him only a couple of weeks before and his kids were off to college. Other than the nurses swinging by and Sarge and friends from the force dropping in, he was going to be alone. I replied to Sarge as he would to me:
Affirmative.
I moved on, scanning the list of unread messages. Still not a word from Dubinin.
I tried to sign in to the team’s database, but a roomful of hackers couldn’t have cracked it. Galvin having ordered us to switch from our proven set-up to Team Build 4.0, a program that his company had just launched to critical pans, consumer complaints, and cratering stock values. Yeah, all the hackers in China couldn’t raid our system for top-secret intel, but neither could our tech-challenged scouting staff sign in to access files. If I wanted to read Dubinin’s latest game reports, I was going to have to get on Skype and get my friend Polo to walk me through it, like he’d already done three or four times before. I’ve never felt as helpless as when Polo was able to move the cursor around my screen and root around right inside my hard drive, soft drive, or whatever, even though he was time zones away. Polo had also helped out Duke and Chief and they had just assumed he was a techie from Fideligence HQ. “Dude, you have to get me on the payroll,” he said. He had a good case. He knew our system and database better than IT support guys on twenty-four-hour help lines. I emailed Polo and told him to drop me a line when he had five minutes and needed a laugh at my expense.
I wasn’t off to a bad start. I was just picking up where I left off in Moscow. When it came to things that mattered, I had always come up empty there. Oh-for-Russia.
My stint in Moscow near the end of my playing days was a minor wrong turn in a career with too many of them. It came three years after I was finished in the league. I had been strapped for cash and decided that I could squeeze a few last bucks out of the game in Europe, a few I could sock away, having broken away from the agent who had fleeced me and a slew of others.
Year One in Helsinki worked out fine, but the team didn’t have a roster spot for me the next fall. Year Two in Germany was safe as milk, lesser hockey for a better buck. My knee handled a forty-game season better than eighty dates and playoffs in The Show. In fact, I played well enough in a couple of exhibition games against KHL teams that Moscow Spartak’s general manager, a slick guy named Lev Shalumov, tracked me down afterwards and made me an informal offer on the spot: he said he’d double my salary and throw in an apartment and car if I was willing to play in Russia the next season. I told him I would be there with bells on. We worked out terms in about an hour over the phone that July. That my agent was never going to see a dime of it made it that much sweeter.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was trying to hook up at last call. The game in Germany was a step down from the Finnish league, just what I needed when I was slowing down. I had done well enough to let ego and memory convince me that I was ready to take a step back up to where I used to play. My comeback: years later it’s hard to imagine I was that dumb.
My two good games in Berlin were just enough to fool Shalumov, more than enough to fool me until I got to Moscow. I reported for training camp with Spartak in August and it felt like my game had deserted me. I kept waiting for it to show up. Never did. It didn’t help that my resolve was wavering. Ol’ Lev promised more than he delivered. My apartment was dreary and an hour on the subway from the arena. My car was a wreck but that hardly mattered because I was completely lost in the city. Cattle to slaughter travelled more comfortably than we did on our road trips. And, worst of all, my first two paycheques were late and the next two weren’t issued at all. And I was getting calls from Toronto: my lawyer was looking to collect for services rendered, namely covering my flank because the X and her Hollywood Divorcionist were lobbing grenades at me. The only reasons for sticking around in Moscow were a couple of leggy blond puck bunnies, identical twins, who dangled at the Boar’s Head nightly. Not quite working girls, but not very far removed. I tired of even that, though, and went on a bender one night when I knew I was done. It led to the Morning After to End All Mornings After. I limped off the ice at practice the next day, clutching my inner thigh, complaining of a pulled groin muscle—bogus but guilt-free. I was just intent on forcing the issue and I needed three Extra Strength Tylenol and an icepack for my aching head. As I had hoped, Lev Shalumov handed me my papers when I was pouring myself a coffee outside the trainer’s room.
I was looking out the window at St. Andrew’s and thinking about the twins when the phone in my room rang. Arzhanov was downstairs.
“Please, come, being fast,” he said.
2
“Yes, please. There is sad story I have.”
“I have hundreds.”
“This is last night.”
“I have a couple from last night. You were in them.”
“This is about the player Belov.”
“What is it?” I said. I braced for the worst. “A knee? A concussion?” Arzhanov cut me off before I worked my way through the list of clinical conditions like the clap or pink eye. He went directly to the bottom of the page.
“Belov is dead.”
“Dead how?”
Some things get lost in translation, but body language is pretty universal. Arzhanov closed his eyes and then crossed his arms over his chest, coffin ready.
I drew a deep breath and I shook. I like to think that I handle death better than most, what with Sarge telling me stories from work. Still, I’m no mortician. I was rattled. I had to find a place to sit down in the lobby and get it together.
“What the fuck happened?”
The first thing that came to mind was a car crash. More than a few Russian guys have checked out that way over the years. Arzhanov put me straight.
“In the game. Last night. He just…”
Arzhanov put his hands together as if in prayer, turned his head on a forty-five degree angle.
“Where’s Dubinin?”
“Is with family Belovs.”
Made sense. For once his excuse for not being on the scene seemed kosher.
“I’ll go to my room and make a couple of calls, then we’ll go,” I said.
“Yes, please.”
3
In the five minutes I had been out of my room, two emails had landed in my inbox. No. 1, Hunts asking if I had any news out of the Spartak–Magnitogorsk game. He had no idea. No. 2, Polo saying that he was crawling in after a poker game and that I should call anytime.
Hunts would have to keep an hour or so until I knew more. I put Polo on the backburner.
I took off the hoodie I had stumbled down to the lobby in and put on the most decent thing I had, a white shirt I had bought at the duty-free in Frankfurt and a creased blazer. I cleaned myself up as best I could, going from haggard to respectable enough to walk into the home of grieving parents.
Before I went back downstairs to go with Arzhanov, I Googled Belov.
One click landed me on an Associated Press story, forty-five minutes old, datelined Moscow. The story, all of three sentences, confirmed Belov’s death, noted that he had been an L.A. draft choice, and mentioned that hospital authorities did not release any information about the cause of death.
A second click landed me on YouTube. Another click let me watch the scene as Aivazovsky the cameraman had seen it through the viewfinder: Belov collapsing on the bench and then the shaky cutaway to the scoreboard. A third click landed me on video that a spectator had captured on his cell: Dmitrov’s head was bowed as if in prayer and Suk skated beside the stretcher, talking to an already-former teammate.
4
Arzhanov said traffic was bad and we were going to save time taking the Metro. We walked down to a station beside Red Square and the last thing I caught a glimpse of before going underground was a Chanel store where distaff members of Russia’s new elite, twenty-something molls for mobsters and their colleagues in the Kremlin, walked out with wrappings worthy of and affordable by royalty and its betters. A blond, all of six feet, sashayed out in fur boots that crawled up legs that didn’t stop. She shuffled over to a waiting stretch limo. I caught myself leering at her but I couldn’t help myself. No red-blooded ex-pro could. They say that eighty percent of Russia’s wealth is in Moscow and eighty percent of Moscow’s wealth is inside the circle that the city’s oldest subway line cuts across. Just about a monopoly on beautiful women, too.
We went down the steps and past the kiosks that sold a little candy and a lot of vodka to commuters and we bought tickets for the automatic turnstiles. The Soviets never did anything halfway back in the 1930s and so they dug the subway a couple of hundred feet deeper than the average coal mine. The escalator was steep enough to induce vertigo, and its descent was as fast as a meteor’s earthly plummet. We only had to wait thirty seconds on the platform before a train pulled up.
Everyone on our car gave me dirty looks, even a one-year-old being wheeled in a beaten-up carriage. I had a flashback to my film studies class at Boston College and gained a new appreciation for Eisenstein’s work on the Odessa Steps. Then I had another, back to my abortive season with Spartak. On my first wanderings around Moscow, I had figured my clothes gave me away as an interloper. Not the whole story, though. No, there are Russian faces, a limited range of them, and then everyone else’s. I couldn’t pass, not that I’d ever want to. And then, even if you can get by on the features, there’s manner. Russians intuitively recognize uncertainty. They sense self-doubt like it gives off the smell of sulfur. It only needs to be something as small as checking the subway map over the doors on the train and not knowing your stop.
I’d have been lost without him, so I stood by Arzhanov’s side like an accordionist’s monkey. We switched trains twice and sped out from the city centre. With every stop out from the innermost circle, the social fabric frayed. Clothes grew older, faces wearier, prospects dimmer.
The Belov family resided in a grimy apartment two steps down from the one where I had lived when I was playing with Spartak. That would leave it five steps down from charmless comfort. I had done no real background check on Belov before we selected him, not so unusual with a pick in the last round as far afield as Russia. I created a profile of him just out of my experience and imagination. I didn’t know him but I knew the type: never a star and so never spoiled, maybe hungry enough that he would make the most of one thin opportunity.
I kept close tabs on Belov when he spent the next winter in Saint John. He was a priority for me, if for no one else in the organization. I made two trips out to the Maritimes and caught two of his games each trip. I introduced myself to him after a Sunday afternoon game in Rimouski. He was standing outside the arena, waiting to board the team bus. He had bummed a cigarette off the driver.
“I know you take me,” he said, clearly and confidently in a language he had never studied until he landed in Saint John. “Thank you. I work hard. I play hard and I get strong.”
Nothing you’d carve in stone, generic vows to validate your faith. Still, I liked him then and even more when he put out his hand for the shaking and gave me a wink, his cigarette butt down to the filter, hanging on his lip. I had logistics to cover and I had only a few minutes, having to drive down the highway to catch a game in Quebec City that night. I asked him about his status with Metallurg and he answered me honestly. “They know, not me,” he said. “Like Saint John and Canada. Is good. Next year, I hope but don’t know…”
Belov had shrugged and held his hands palms upward.
I told Belov in slow, simple, but certain terms that I wanted him to come to Los Angeles’s rookie camp, a couple of weeks in July, and he was predictably eager. I tried to put across the fact that frosty relations between the KHL and our league would make it hard to pull off. His release to Saint John was for only this one season and his visa was going to run out at the end of May.
I never asked him about his family but it didn’t occur to me that the Belovs would be in Moscow until Arzhanov mentioned that Dubinin had gone to the kid’s family after the fateful game. Junior teams outside of Moscow are pretty well limited to kids in their region. A seventeen-year-old or eighteen-year-old from the outskirts of Moscow travelling a thousand miles to play in Magnitogorsk: it didn’t fit. I asked Arzhanov about it when we were walking up to the front door to the Belovs’ apartment building.
“No Moscow team want him,” he said. “He goes because is coach with Red Army in Moscow who knows the Belov brother. Is a gift he does him. Calls coach in Magnitogorsk. Need players. Boy wants play very much.”
The elevator was out of service, so Arzhanov and I had to scale the stairs to the eighth floor. By the seventh, his three-pack-a-day habit had him wheezing and I was limping, Arthur’s hot knife digging into my medial collateral ligament. Arzhanov knocked three times on a thick grey metal door. We could hear rumbles inside but no answer. Arzhanov knocked again and finally the door creaked and rattled open. Behind it was a guy, 6’2” and 250 pounds, unshaven and sleep-deprived. He said nothing and turned his back on us, limping back to a woman, his wife, standing by a grimy window that looked out on other grimy windows across the way. I put him at forty-five. He had Stage 3 hair loss, and when he turned to look at us, I saw that he had grey in his thick stubble, which was broken by a random geometric pattern of scar tissue, like you’d see with a fall through glass or maybe a slashing with a broken bottle. His wife looked a little younger but even more defeated.
Arzhanov made the basic introductions. “Vladimir…Olga…Shade.”
“I am so sorry for the loss of your son,” I said hopelessly.
Vlad nodded and looked to Arzhanov for translation and explanation. The little troll unleashed a torrent of words that lasted a full three minutes. At the end of it Vlad mumbled a few words and nodded but Olga stood stock-still, as if we weren’t there.
Arzhanov turned his attention back to me. “Is brother and wife,” he said, “father, mother dead.”
I missed it and it was laid out right there in three plastic frames on the counter in the kitchen: cheap studio photo of Vlad at attention in army best and with a couple of paltry medals; a recent scan of a ’50s-vintage black-and-white photo of a couple, beneath that a string of Cyrillic characters, names as my best guess, and beneath that 1954–2008 and 1961–2008; and a wedding shot, Vlad, sans stubble with hair, probably age eighteen, in his suit, and Olga, a schoolgirl in the best that she had, standing with sets of parents on either side, and Li’l Sergei pulling at his hero’s leg. It turned out that Vlad was thirty-two and Olga two years younger.
Vlad talked; Arzhanov did the translation and filled in blanks.
“He is old soldier, brother Sergei is twelve years not so old.”
The limp gave the army reason to spit him out and not enough to look after him after his discharge.
“Father, mother in car die in Magnitogorsk. Sergei does living with a player in Magnitogorsk.”
I jumped in: “Who?”
Arzhanov asked Vlad, and I made out that it was Dmitrov. On his pay Dmitrov could have had a luxury crib and provided room, board, and employment for a live-in entourage.
Vlad then spoke without prompting, and Arzhanov listened with his head down, avoiding eye contact.
“He say he was in arena when brother die.”
“Tell them, I’m sorry.”
Arzhanov’s translation was brief and it didn’t look like it registered at all with the Belovs. I could have said more. I could have said that I thought their Sergei had a chance to make it in L.A. I didn’t. It seemed cruel to remind Vlad and Olga that their single chance to get off this apartment block had died, three months before his twentieth birthday.
