The third man in, p.6
The Third Man In, page 6
“Ivan, my friend here says that the word is going around that you’re working for someone else,” Marks said. “I’m disappointed. We don’t pay you enough?”
Kelly has always been a shit-disturber and player of head games.
Ivan looked at me as his accuser and then turned to Markham. “You pay me good,” he said. “No one else.”
“I know different,” Markham said.
“Is not true,” Ivan said. He couldn’t afford indignation. He took as much emotion out of his protests as possible. Pushing back too hard wouldn’t snuff suspicions but just raise others.
I jumped in. “I’ve heard that somebody is working for an agent,” I said. “I didn’t want my friend, my old teammate here, to get burned.”
“You talk, you look at your own,” Ivan said.
“Dubinin is a good man,” I said. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.
“He is, how you say in English, you push zero…”
This round of Password landed Kelly Markham’s team ten points. “Operator,” he said.
“Da, operator.”
Ding-Ding-Ding.
“Do you know which agent he’s working for?” Markham said. It wasn’t my place to ask.
“A Russian, he says, never say name, only players in KHL, not any in North America.”
Great, I thought, doing his bit to spur the national economy.
Marks pressed him. “Any others?”
“I don’t know.”
Silence between us was hanging when it kicked in for Ivan, the notion that he had spoken too freely. He took a deep breath and walked it back. The hockey business is no fit place for Boy Scouts or Young Pioneers. “This is always a story here…there is something you have he wants,” Ivan said, pointing to me as the you and Markham as the he. “If you are going to sell what you have, there must be a third man, someone between. This is Dubinin. This is others. Agent wants player, third man get player for him. Team in KHL it wants a player, third man makes push to player that this is what he should do.”
“A player wants to get drafted by one of our teams in North America and the third man gives him a little push,” I said.
“I do not think so,” Ivan said. “This is our story, not yours. How you do business is different than us. Your rules are in books. Rules here are not in books but everyone knows. This is our chess. Much of game is moving between pieces.”
The idea of the third man was sound but hard to square with Dubinin’s game here. He hadn’t pushed us to take Dmitrov when we were in our meetings before the draft. He had made the case that we shouldn’t take the kid. If he was looking for a piece of action, a kickback from Dmitrov or Dmitrov’s agent or both, he would have been pushing us to pick him and heating up the competition for his services. If he was going to get a piece of the transfer fee that L.A. was going to pay Magnitogorsk for his release, again, he would have been pushing us to draft him. Dubinin couldn’t be the middleman in a case where he was trying to keep the two sides apart. Maybe there was a bigger offer out there, bigger stakes. I didn’t know.
At that point I heard Ivan’s iPhone blurt the opening chords to “Start Me Up.” At the bar, Pete Townsend’s windmilling alerted another Russian scout to an incoming call that he answered before Roger Daltry could introduce the New Boss. A third phone in a third Russian pocket burst onto the first couple of bars of “Back in Black,” as if we didn’t hear it every night in every arena we worked in. The three Russian scouts Da-Da-Da’d their ends of conversations. Ivan yelled across the room at the bartender and had him find the twenty-four-hour news network, Vesti on Россияo1, Rossiya-1. It was intermission, so no one put up a protest when every screen went over to a live feed from a suburban tract littered with twisted metal and broken glass.
10
The good news for Dubinin: his beloved Bentley was in the shop getting a tune-up and oil change. The bad news: his wife of twenty years would be riding in it to his funeral. She wasn’t going to have to worry about the sight of his luxury ride in her driveway bringing back haunting memories, though. Word was that, in his last will and testament, Dubinin bequeathed it to his famous father.
It wasn’t quite the lead item on the nightly news. Vladimir Putin owned the leadoff spot in the batting order. Putin was professing to have no opinion about the rights of environmental activists to assemble in Red Square before foreign television cameras and no opinion about the legitimacy of their concerns about the chemical spoiling of the Motherland’s Natural Splendour. But to the protestors’ distress, the President said that he didn’t have any opinion about the severity of the sentences handed down in the courts and didn’t think it was appropriate to intervene. A Man of the People, Vlad has always known how to exercise executive restraint.
Comrade Dubinin’s tragic passing was the second item on the newscast. Even though he was a national sports hero, he was now less notable for who he was than how he’d departed.
Car bombings were a fact of life in Moscow back in the ’90s, when rival mobs were grasping for turf and influence, while Yeltsin was either waddling around a tennis court or anaesthetizing himself, draining promotional-sized bottles of Stolch. Back in ’97, postage-stamp-sized pieces of an executive of the Russian hockey federation were vacuumed off a Moscow street when he put himself on the wrong side of the wrong people. But in the new millennium, Putin revived the KGB and rechristened it the FSB. The agency outstripped its forerunner as if the old boys ran on AAA batteries and the new crowd was powered by plutonium. The KGB had looked outward at the world and ran its games on foreign shores, but Putin, an alumnus, read the national mood and decided the FSB should concern itself with consolidating the homeland. And when a sense of peace was restored, the people were fine with the FSB terrorizing those who would do the nation harm: murderous gangs straight out of Capone’s Chicago, suicide bombers for an independent Chechnya, or seditious protesters who waved signs that insulted the Kremlin in front of foreign journalists.
Ivan gave us the running translation as a reporter went live to air. I watched as the camera panned the scene and video highlights of Dubinin at the ’88 Olympics rolled. The woman turning away from the camera was Mrs. Dubinin. The stone-faced old man nodding gravely at the scene was Dubinin Sr. I looked down the bar at the other scouts. Those who came over from Canada and the States looked stricken when they realized who had bought the farm and how the deal had gone down, but their Russian co-workers, those who had known Dubinin for years, didn’t pause as they ate their sandwiches. The bartender teed up his countrymen with a round of shots and they toasted dear ol’ Vlad.
“Your buddies don’t seem so sad about how this has turned out,” I said to Ivan.
Ivan delivered a reply with something between a sigh and a smirk.
“You have to understand death is life in Russia. We have a submarine and it sinks and a hundred die. For one day we talk about it and we go on. We don’t ask why. We don’t know how. But they are dead. One hundred, is not a lot. In United States, three thousand die in New York and for ten years they talk. This is not our way. We have had thousands die. We have had millions die and this makes us look at things different. Everybody has death. Father. Mother. Brother. Many. It is our history. Not so different. Is sadness, yes, for Dubinin, but we go to game tonight, yes? Of course, we go.”
11
Dubinin was the only scout I’ve ever met who drove a Bentley. I had asked him about it on my last trip to Moscow. It was a conversation we had over breakfast the morning of my flight back to Toronto. I told him to pick the spot, you know, local knowledge and all that. He managed to pick Café Pushkin and he ordered caviar and blini. Only when I did the exchange did I realize his breakfast snack was $140. Only when he was in deep conversation with our spiffy waiter did I realize that Dubinin dropped in regularly, maybe even as part of his working day. To his credit, he put our breakfast on a platinum card that wasn’t our team’s corporate plastic.
“I have been very lucky with what you say are investments,” Dubinin told me. “If you have good friends, you will do good, yes?”
12
The counterman dropped Ivan’s Coke in front of him and gave him a What-Are-You-Doing-With-These-Guys look. I pushed Ivan for more about Dubinin’s friends and he filled in the blanks for me. Not voluntarily.
“Don’t ask these questions,” he said, and he looked over at Marks. “Kelly, tell him please, no questions.”
“You are working for me, right?” Marks said, even though it felt like he was being co-opted to work for L.A.
“You have to understand that he is powerful man, yes?”
“Not powerful enough,” I said.
It was lost on him.
“Powerful in many ways.”
I figured I might as well press while I had him. “Famous player,” I said. “Doesn’t make him powerful.”
“Is history. Brother of father of Dubinin…”
“His uncle,” Marks said, in full command of the obvious.
“Powerful man, yes. Work for Kremlin in Spain, France, other places, and in New York—big building what is name? World come.”
“United Nations,” Marks said.
Ivan didn’t have a clue and went on. “Yes, is Russian man in the Nations in New York, is years ago.”
“So, Dubinin’s family is powerful because of his uncle,” I said.
“No, is more. Is his father same.”
“The soccer star for Dynamo,” I said.
“Is soccer as young man,” Ivan said. “More after. From St. Petersburg, yes. Go to Germany.”
“To play soccer?” I asked.
“Is working,” Ivan said. “Dynamo man. Powerful man. Son become powerful man.”
“Dubinin’s father, he was a diplomat then?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Ivan said. He seemed frustrated that I wasn’t getting it and he had hit the wall of what he could put into words in what wasn’t even his second language. Ivan picked up more German from his time coaching in the Czech Republic than he did English in his one season in Winnipeg. “Family makes powerful. Powerful. Powerful in Dynamo, yes. You understand?”
It didn’t seem that complicated. It was, though.
“It’s just a hockey club. It would be different if it were Red Army. He’d be connected with all the generals or whatever.”
“Dynamo strong in different way,” he said. “More important. Special today. Now. Many friends in new Russia, yes.”
I could have followed that up, but I didn’t. The conversation seemed like it was going nowhere.
I had to call Hunts with an update. One prospect Tragically Gone, one scout blown to Kingdom Come. We were going to have to sew black armbands on both sleeves of L.A. sweaters. I didn’t want Hunts to get blindsided by the news online or, worse, to hear about it from a reporter who was calling him for comment.
I thanked Marks and a visibly distressed Ivan and went up to my room. I checked my iPhone. Charged up, no messages.
I picked up the landline, logged in my international phone-card number, and dialled Hunts’s cell. It went directly to his voicemail.
After I left him a fairly desperate “call me,” I remembered that Hunts was flying to the GMs’ meetings at The Breakers in West Palm. He was thirty thousand feet above the news cycle. I had a bit of a reprieve, I thought, but only until he checked into the hotel where the media would be waiting for him.
I pulled out my computer and connected to the Marriott’s wi-fi to cross-check Ivan’s dope with a Google search.
I allowed for fifty percent bullshit factor. Talk isn’t cheap. It’s free. Power gives you the two absolute bullshit props: I Have It and He Has It.
The I Have It is just so much bullshit. Those who have power don’t have to brag about it. They just go ahead and use it. Or they already have squashed everything in their way before you had a clue. In that case, it doesn’t need to be said.
The He Has It is tougher. You have to listen when a guy tells you about another guy’s clout. Some are inclined, with either respect or fear, to give The Guy with the Hammer a little too much credit for his sphere of influence. Maybe that’s a default mindset in a totalitarian state. I suspected that Ivan might have overplayed the Dubinins’ sphere of influence. Turned out he hadn’t. The Dubinin clan didn’t just have a great big hammer, but a nail gun and blowtorch too.
I did a quick search. The first: Dubinin and United Nations. All kinds of hits. The page dedicated to him on a state-run English-language site called him “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary in Diplomatic Service.” No obits, so he was still kicking, semi-surprising given that he was born in 1930. Any years in your seventies amount to a second or third period of overtime when you look at Russian life expectancy, a very hard sixty-nine. I found a CV for Uncle Yuri. He must have cozied up to the right comrades and kissed their Russian asses to move from one comfy gig to another, from lowly intern at the Soviet Embassy in Paris at age thirty-four to a seat on the UN Security Council, Gorby’s man. The career trajectory was pretty telling: Comrade Yuri would come back to Moscow for a year or two at a time and then, after getting an eyeful of the breadlines and having his blood chilled by winter, would head off on an assignment to a garden spot. Such is the Plenipotentiary Life.
A search for Dubinin and Dynamo produced other chapters, separate but parallel, in the Dubinin family saga. Two streams of images popped up. In black and white, Dubinin’s old man in baggy shorts in flight in Dynamo’s beat-down of mighty Arsenal on the Londoners’ first trip to Moscow in ’54. In washed-out colour, the son with the K on his No. 13 sweater in a shot from the ’90s. The two showed up together on an English-language fan site’s list of athletes from Dynamo. One New York Times story surfaced as well, a minor one that caught up to the younger Dubinin when he was coaching in Berlin just after his career ended. He told the reporter that his career and his father’s overlapped: the old man had been loaned by Dynamo to a German second-division team at the end of his career, and the family had lived in East Germany for a time when the old man had a coaching job with the GDR’s national program.
Ivan had been shooting straight, I thought. The Romanovs were long gone but the Dubinins were another brand of Russian royalty.
13
Hunts called me back a half hour later. “Run that by me one more time.”
And I did. One dead of natural causes, one left as just so much human stew on the pavement.
“Jesus,” Hunts said. “How’d…”
He ran out of words right there and I tried to fill in the blanks. “They don’t know what happened with the kid,” I said. “I’m trying to find out. Aneurysm, heart, blood clot…I don’t know. Haven’t heard anything about an autopsy. I’m not optimistic that we’re going to get a straight answer, not if someone’s ass is on the line.”
“And what the fuck happened with Dubinin?”
“I don’t know. I just missed him. He was at the Belovs’ apartment a few hours before I got there. Few hours later…boom goes the dynamite.”
“I know lotsa people didn’t like him, but who’d go that far?”
“Anyone who lived as large as Dubinin had to work with some dirty guys, enough to be one of the dirty guys,” I said. “This shit sometimes happens to dirty guys.”
“Jesus,” Hunts said.
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “Now we don’t have to worry about firing him.”
Hunts groaned.
“Hey, when in Russia, think like a Russian,” I said.
“Pay your respects to his wife and whatever you do with the Belovs, that’s fine. If you need more time, take it. But keep your eye on the ball. You’re over there for Dmitrov, right? Get him. We wasted our pick if he signs a long-term deal in the KHL. I know Belov was your pet project and everything, but it’s Dmitrov we want.”
He had a good point. It left me with one question, and I had to ask it at the risk of seeming clueless.
“Do you know who’s representing him?” I asked.
“What the fuck you mean? It’s Buckhold who’s doing all the lifting on the buyout with Magnitogorsk.”
“Thing is, I’ve talked to two guys who say they represent the kid and that Buckhold has been cut out.”
“Last I heard was that it was Buckhold.”
“Yeah, well, third last thing I heard was Buckhold,” I said. “Second last, your buddy Karl Beck. Last thing I heard was some guy named Salnikov saying that he can deliver the goods, and I don’t even think he’s an agent. He’s definitely not certified by the league.”
“And so?”
“ ‘And so’…I dunno. If I can talk to the kid tonight, I can get something close to a straight answer, one that will stand up for a day or two anyway. Will you call Buckhold and see what gives? I haven’t seen him here. He’s either in the Toronto office or…”
“…anywhere,” Hunts added unhelpfully.
“Yeah, could be anywhere,” I said. “I don’t know if he has a guy on the ground here. If he does, I don’t know who it is.”
“Okay, I’ll message ol’ Ollie and call him after the morning meetings here,” Hunts said. “Look, Shadow, I hate to cut short such a pleasant conversation, but I’ve got an appointment for a massage in the spa. My back is killing me after the flight.”
“If this is going to take some extra time putting this together here, I hope I’m not going to get any grief about my expenses if I’m changing my ticket or whatever.”
“Okay, look, Shadow, I’m going.”
“I was born too old for this shit,” I said.
“Shadow, we did know what we were getting ourselves in for drafting this kid. Remember, it wasn’t me who said, ‘Whatever it takes we can handle it.’ ”
