The third man in, p.4
The Third Man In, page 4
Vlad, it turned out, was a day labourer on construction sites, unskilled meat, working with the handicap of shrapnel in his upper thigh and a hip that needed replacing. The Belovs needed their run of luck not to take another turn for the worse just to be able to keep looking out that grimy window at the other grimy windows of the grimy buildings across the crowded way.
An uncomfortable silence and stillness fell on the room, interrupted only by Vlad lighting a cigarette for Olga and one for himself.
“I thought Dubinin was here with them,” I said to Arzhanov.
Vladimir made out the name without Arz’s help and had a few terse words. Arzhanov translated.
“He say, ‘He come and he go to how you say…’ ”
“Hospital,” Olga said, turning her back on us. “He is at hospital. And to people who must dig the ground for Sergei.”
I didn’t realize that Olga was even listening, never mind understanding. I scanned the room and saw another framed photo, this one of Olga in an Aeroflot uniform. She spoke enough English and enough German and enough of whatever else to work international flights. That was before life got turned sideways and she had to give up her job to look after Vlad when he was first discharged and bedridden, so she explained to Arzhanov, who explained it all to me later on.
“Sergei is killed. Not…”
She couldn’t come up with the words and gave up trying.
“Natural causes,” I said.
She shook her head. “Not natural,” she said. “He did not must to die. He is killed. Dubinin says something is done. And we must to do a thing. Is his heart…”
She patted high on her breast without looking at us.
“…but he is killed.”
Vlad shot Olga a burning look that never found her eyes, not even when he growled her name.
5
I had done all that I could with the Belovs, which wasn’t much at all and no consolation to them. I still had a game to scout: the under-20 teams from Dynamo and CKSA Red Army, the two big Moscow programs, were on the ice in an early-afternoon game at Luzhniki, the big arena in town. I told Arzhanov to take me there directly. On the subway ride I tried to think of what I could give Vlad and Olga on behalf of the team. I settled on a framed picture of the kid, an action shot, maybe his hockey card from Saint John, something that a photo store could pull down off the internet and mount with type along the bottom, Sergei Belov 1991–2012. Something like Vlad had done for his parents. Vlad probably wanted to do the same thing for his kid brother but it might have been an awful luxury with every ruble coming into the Belov household already spoken for.
On the escalator riding back up to street level, I put a question to Arzhanov that only just then occurred to me. I put the delay down to jet lag.
“How do you know Dubinin?”
“Many ways. A person must know many people. My comrade does.”
I couldn’t see an anonymous little troll like Arzhanov as a buddy of a guy with clout in the capital.
“You work for him?”
“I am how they say asset.”
“Assistant,” I said. “Secretary. Boy Friday. Gopher.”
“Is yes,” he said, as if each title conferred escalating status.
Dubinin was something close to a noble. In Moscow he could forever dine out on his distinguished service with Dynamo and Soviet national teams, including the one that came away with gold in ’88. Anywhere I had gone with Dubinin in Moscow, locals would sit up a little straighter and extend him every courtesy and favour. They would ask him about his father, who had played soccer for the Dynamo team back in the ’50s and scored two goals in a rout of Arsenal in front of eighty thousand in Moscow. He would shake hands with men who would dip their heads. “I tell them it’s nothing, just the past,” he told me, when receiving them. His smug smile said he thought it was still quite something, still living and breathing.
On the walk from the station to the arena I checked my iPhone again: no reply from Dubinin. A minute later Arzhanov’s iPhone pinged. He pulled it out of his jacket’s inside pocket, took one look, and, without pause or change of expression, put it back, zipping his jacket to the neck. I suspected Arzhanov knew exactly how to catch up to his friend or boss or master or liege or whatever Dubinin was to him.
“Was that him?” I said.
“No,” he said. “It is another.”
Arzhanov didn’t seem one for full disclosure, and his help was for the offering not the asking.
At Luzhniki’s main gate Arzhanov sorted through four pairs of tickets, one for each of the games I was working in Moscow, and found those for this Dynamo-CKSA Jrs.
“This is one for game here,” he said. “These for others, yes.”
I had presumed that we’d have to buy a pair at the box office. I didn’t ask him where, how, or why he picked up the ducats. All Dubinin would have known when he sent Arzhanov out to Domodedovo was that my plane was going to be late and I was missing the game at Spartak Thursday night. Somehow, though, he had given his flunky tickets for all the games through the weekend, as if he either thought he would be indisposed or was just not inclined to see me at all, like I wasn’t worth his time.
6
Junior games aren’t hot-ticket items in Moscow. Some spend the pocket change just to get in out of the cold. This game at lunchtime drew about a hundred people out to Luzhniki and half of those were there on business. I did a quick head count: thirty-five reputable hockey men, full-time scouts from the league. They’re always easy to make with their team-issued jackets with the crest over their hearts or their clipboards with their allegiances embossed on the back. The rest of the crowd was a small infestation of established agents and pretenders looking to suck a buck or screw a ruble out of the game.
Arzhanov sat beside me and I ignored him. I had work to do. I had the names and numbers of the players of interest on my iPhone and during the warm-up I checked to see if any of them had been scratched. Turned out that all of them on my shopping list were in stock this day at the meat market.
CKSA Red Army and Dynamo dominated the top Russian players eligible for the draft in June. For the two franchises this was the halcyon days all over. In the Soviet era, no other outfits really counted, the entire roster of the national team being drawn from the two programs. Post-glasnost, après perestroika and after Gorbachev owned the world’s most recognized port-wine stain, hockey talent spread more widely across the former republics. Roiling reform left Red Army in a financial shambles, the Kremlin cutting off much of its funding in the nation’s uneasy transition to the market economy. In recent years, though, Putin muscled through market corrections as he saw appropriate, including the restoration of Red Army and Dynamo to their approximate former glories. Back then Red Army was No. 1, Dynamo No. 2. These days they’ve switched seats at the top of the table, but that didn’t matter to me. These were the two places where you started looking for young talent on any trip to Russia.
Only three players in this tilt interested me: two small but skilled forwards with CKSA, Nezerov and Chadrin, and a defenceman with Dynamo, Borzov, a huge kid who was the nephew of a guy who washed out in a training camp in L.A. back in my third season there. I was going to file reports on this game, but I’d have to attach a half-ton of asterisks to them. I had to figure out how motivated they were to come over—not much according to a report on Yahoo.com filed by its Russian correspondent. On the website Ilya “The Real Deal-ya” Pushkin floated the rumour that these kids wanted to stay in Russia and compete for places on the Olympic team that would be playing in Sochi. I could have spared them wounded feelings down the line with a cold, hard fact in advance: they had no shot.
The Real Deal-ya’s report wasn’t completely out of line, though. For the last five years it seemed like fewer and fewer Russian kids heard the siren call from North America. They can make a serious buck playing at home. Guys who made instant billions in natural resources have been snapping up clubs and making them attractive places to play, each a point of pride to win the hearts and minds of their communities. The freshly minted oligarchs also served as patrons of Red Army and Dynamo, the government teams in the capital, and could buy friends in the Kremlin by staking the KHL’s Tiffany franchises with tens of millions at a toss. The business model wasn’t sustainable, not even in Putin’s kleptocracy. Putin and his crew were just going to prop it up through the Olympics in Sochi. That’s what we were banking on when we drafted the two Russian kids.
Back on our side of the ocean, self-styled patriots, including a couple of famous TV clowns, were calling Russian kids staying at home a positive development, opening up more jobs for red-blooded Canadians and Americans. Bullshit. You won’t find a scout in the biz who agrees. Our league is starved for talent. There’s just not enough skill to go around for thirty teams. Every roster has at least a couple of guys who wouldn’t have had a sniff back before expansion. Turning off the tap in Russia was bad for the quality of play in Canada and the U.S. and what’s bad for the league is bad for all of us working in it.
Five minutes into this tilt at Luzhniki, I knew I wasn’t going to find any diamonds. Nezerov and Chadrin would never cut it as first-line players in L.A. and probably not second-line either. Players on the bottom half of the line-up we can dig up shopping closer to home. Meanwhile, Borzov’s game had holes in it and I didn’t like his body language. He was just an updated and unimproved edition of his dirtbag uncle, who, in his otherwise forgettable trip to L.A.’s training camp, stank up our dressing room with his farts.
I was making these dreary notes in my iPhone calendar when my radar sensed an incoming nuisance: a stubby little greaseball in a suit that was worth eight grand if it was worth a dollar. Of course, he’d get a discount for buying in bulk. For Karl Beck this passed for Casual Friday. Beck wasn’t the only agent based in California, just the only one whose embossed, suitable-for-framing business cards announced that his office was in Beverly Hills. His list of clients wasn’t long but it constituted an exclusive club, stars of a certain magnitude, such that they could afford to become his neighbours. Over the years, he had a dozen Russians on his list and he won them over the old-fashioned way: he paid for them. For every client there’d be a cash-stuffed envelope and a promise of a kickback on contract commissions for the KHL team’s president, who would lean on the kid, basically extorting full compliance. The manager and the coach would get a palm greased with hard currency just to stay on message. A bottle to the trainer every visit just to get the Latest Dirt Inside and there was always Dirt Inside.
“Hey Brad, how are you doing?” Beck asked, not that he cared, mostly because he had to clear his throat before getting down to his agent-type business.
“Good,” I said coldly, not that it stopped him from sitting down beside me. He turned to his fixer, who walked five steps behind him and sat two seats away. “Val, get us a coffee.”
Val bowed his head and made for the concourse.
Beck tried to strike up a friendly conversation. I didn’t play along willingly. I gave up and down answers to his banal questions. Yes, the team is doing well. No, I don’t think there’s going to be a trade. Yes, I know New York is shopping Kirby, your star winger. No, I don’t think Barker will be out for the rest of the season. Then he cut to his second-biggest bit of business.
“Think there’s any chance that you’re going to extend Polodny?” he asked, flashing his diamond cufflinks when checking a wristwatch that I couldn’t buy with a year’s salary.
“I really don’t know,” I lied. I could have told him that there was no chance. If I had done that, though, I would have been inviting him to get in a dry run of the pitch he’d be hitting Hunts with over the summer, a pitch that would go nowhere. We were only holding on to Polodny because we needed a depth player for a playoff run. We had a kid in the minors who was going to be ready the following fall to do Polodny’s job at a fraction of the price.
“Awful thing about Belov,” Beck said.
I left it with a sigh and a nod. Beck then dropped the bomb that he had held back in reserve.
“I don’t know if you heard but I have signed up Dmitrov as a client.”
The first I heard of it. Usually, you’ll hear a rumble if a player is pissed at his agent and contemplating a split. I hadn’t heard a thing about Dmitrov jumping off Ollie Buckhold’s wagon. If it had been even a whisper, Dubinin should have known about it and kept head office in the loop. It didn’t come as a shock to me that Dubinin was either unaware of a development in his own backyard or incommunicado with Hunts and me.
Even without backup, I couldn’t write off Beck’s claim. Canadian and American players fire agents and hire new ones now and then, but most, like sweethearts in a country song, loyally dance with the ones that brung them. Millennial Russians look at representation as a week-to-week proposition. It’s not unusual for Young Boris to have jilted two agents before he signs a North American deal. Nor is it unusual for Young Boris’s representation to be a matter of dispute, a legal dance that’s hockey’s version of a paternity case, both sides claiming to be the prodigy’s daddy. Agents are ruthless but even the most hard-core of them could learn tricks from Young Boris. He’ll manipulate agents, even the guys who’ve been around forever and should know better. He’ll squeeze cash and cars and apartments out of them in advance of his first pro contract. Once Young Boris is satisfied that all the juice is out of the lemon, he’ll dump the agent and start all over again. Everywhere else the kids are supposed to be the naïfs, but Young Boris intuitively recognizes weakness and gets what he can out of those who want a piece of him. He knows his talent has seduced an agent and uses the agent’s greed against him.
Almost every scout hates every agent and even if I could set aside my bankruptcy I’d hate agents more than most. Agents gum up the works, turn kids’ heads, badmouth teams, and just poison the water. In a perverse way, I respected the Russian kids for throwing bags of catnip at the agents and then spraying them with a garden hose. At least, that was the case until I weighed the possibility of Dmitrov’s release getting complicated, delayed, or derailed completely because Beck had scalped Buckhold’s prize client.
I didn’t want to seem rattled by Beck’s newsflash. I didn’t have time or inclination to calculate the possible bullshit factor. I did my best nonplussed and deflected the conversation away from business to the game.
“Dmitrov’s a talented kid,” I said.
“I can get him to L.A.,” Beck said. It was a six-word declaration, the sum of which was contingent on the first four words. I had no idea who had been paid off but he must have gouged Beck. In markets grey and black, the more you pay the more you’re inclined to believe that you’re buying legitimate goods and services.
“I hope so,” I said. Whether Dmitrov came with Beck or Ollie or anyone else didn’t matter to me one little bit.
At this point, Val made it back with the coffees. Beck prattled on and didn’t ask about Arzhanov sitting next to me. Arzhanov extended the agent the same discourtesy.
I tried to be direct. “I want to sit down with him. Can you set it up? My scout here should have been doing this…”
“Dubinin?” he asked. “He’s a good man.”
I considered the source and let that pass. “Metallurg is here tonight and they have Dynamo tomorrow. I want to talk to him after the game. Away from the rink. Say, the Courtyard. Eleven.”
“Consider it done,” Beck said. I consider things done when they’re done, especially with something as potentially empty as an agent’s promise. Even more so in Russia, where promises tend to end up as punchlines.
I checked out Beck’s fixer, who stared straight ahead, not looking at the game, just at the empty seats on the other side of the ice. Val could have passed for Arzhanov’s older brother. Shorter and older, he wore photo-grey prescription glasses that were almost opaque, even though the lighting inside the arena was dim. He said a couple of words in Russian to Beck and the agent nodded. Beck, whose name at birth was not four letters but four syllables, replied in his second language, his immigrant parents’ first.
Arzhanov leaned forward in his seat, inspected those sitting on the far side of me, and leaned back again without change of expression. He seemed to recognize Beck’s winger but didn’t say a word to him.
Just a few minutes into the first period, Arzhanov checked his iPhone. He read a text and stood up. “I must go,” he said without further explanation. And he did. He was out of his seat like he was spring-loaded. He didn’t seem worried about my ride back to the Marriott. I asked what gives, and he heard me but didn’t even give me a glance back over his shoulder. He raced up the steps to the gate like he was being chased.
I would have been stranded at the arena after the game, but I ended up catching a ride back to the hotel with Beck. The little creep helpfully recommended that I stay at the Ritz-Carlton next time and try out its five-star restaurant if I liked French dining.
“Out of my price range,” I said. “We’re not one of the champagne organizations. Gotta travel on a budget.”
“I’m surprised,” Beck said. “It was your guy here in Moscow who told me about the Ritz. He helped me get a good rate.”
That, I supposed, was just part of what made Dubinin “a good man” in Beck’s books.
“If you happen to see him cracking an oyster there at happy hour, let him know I’m looking for him,” I said.
7
Magnitogorsk was going to be playing CKSA in a KHL league game at Luzhniki that night but the drop of the puck was more than four hours off. I needed to track down Hunts to get him up to speed and I wanted to do that back at the hotel on a landline. I check in with Hunts daily. He had been the backup goaltender in L.A. when I broke into the league and on the darkest night of his 80-proof life I went looking for him with a flashlight and dragged him into rehab. When Hunts landed the GM’s job with our old club, he repaid me for saving his career and probably his life, putting me on the payroll when my own prospects were bottoming out.
