The third man in, p.7
The Third Man In, page 7
“You really know how to hurt a guy.”
“What we do as an organization going forward, I dunno. Do we really want to put ourselves through this again with a Russian kid?”
“It’s not your car blowing up,” I said.
“Just make sure that you don’t get yourself blown up.”
It hadn’t occurred to me until he said it.
14
Ten times. A dozen. More. I can’t tell you how many times during a season when a scout heads to a game to see Joe Prospect and he finds a line drawn through Joe Prospect’s name on the line-up, signifying that Little Joey is a scratch. It might be the flu. It might be a sprain. It might be a coach spanking a kid for showing up late for practice. Add to that number the times when Joe Prospect is in the line-up but gets knocked out of the game with an injury after a shift or two. Just two weeks before this Russia trip I had driven four hours through a blizzard to Sudbury to see a goalie who pulled up lame in the warm-up. If you allow that stuff to get to you, you’re not cut out for the business. You have to be able to laugh off your great wastes of time.
Marks and I hopped in Ivan’s car and made it to Luzhniki in time to see Metallurg and CKSA take the ice for the pre-game warm-up. No Dmitrov. Just one-third of the first line, Jiri Suk, was available for duty. I should have seen it coming and not simply because this road trip had been going sideways even before we taxied out to the runway in Toronto. No, I missed Magnitogorsk’s game against Spartak Thursday night, and Dubinin didn’t file one last game report, so Dmitrov could have taken a shot off an ankle or suffered some other sort of wound that might have knocked him out of Friday night’s game. Even if he finished the game in one piece, Belov’s death might have rattled him enough for Metallurg’s coach to decide to scratch Dmitrov from the line-up. It would have been a lot to ask of a nineteen-year-old to go out and perform less than twenty-four hours after looking into the eyes of his just-dead teammate, roommate, and friend.
It was a letdown. Seeing a talented kid and imagining what he can do for your team: that’s what scouts jones for. When I had watched Dmitrov the first time, I was able to imagine him as the centrepiece of a championship team that would gift diamond-encrusted rings to our players and staffers. In my case that ring would be the second I’d earn, but the first that I wouldn’t have to watch go to the highest bidder at a bankruptcy auction. But I had already seen enough and imagined too much with Dmitrov. His absence from the line-up didn’t mean that the night had to be a complete loss. No, my job wasn’t to scout him. We owned his rights. My job was what Hunts had laid out. I had to do whatever was necessary to get him to L.A., not necessarily stopping short of kidnapping him. I needed to talk to him. I needed to find out what the hell was going on.
The crowd was still filing in during the warm-ups when I took a couple of laps of the arena to see if I could spot Dmitrov. High and dry on that count. I figured he had reason to keep a low profile. He might not have wanted to have to deal with Ilya “The Real Deal-ya” Pushkin and other media types who had questions about Belov’s death.
I headed down to the dressing room. In the stairwell I bumped into Ivan, who was on his way back up to meet Marks. Ivan had gone down to the dressing room to talk to the trainer, an old friend. I asked Ivan if he would go back down and translate for me. He spared me the trip.
“Dmitrov not here, trainer say,” Ivan said.
“Which hotel is the team staying at?” I asked.
“Trainer say he leave team. Team not knowing.”
A couple of syringes of Novocaine couldn’t have made me more numb. I wouldn’t remember anything about what happened on the ice that night. It was cold but I was breaking out in a nervous sweat. Life had just become a hell of a lot more complicated. My job had been to bring home the wunderkind. Now my job was finding him. It dawned on me before the second intermission: whoever had blown up the car in Dubinin’s driveway might have been looking for Dmitrov too. More fresh dread in the third period: whoever had ground Dubinin’s beef might already have custody of Dmitrov and could be ready to use any leftover plastic explosives to keep him.
15
I waited with Marks beside Magnitogorsk’s bus out by the arena’s loading docks after the game. I didn’t hold out hope of getting a straight answer about Dmitrov’s whereabouts from Metallurg’s coach, a Russian guy who replaced Holman last summer. Holman I knew, at least to say hi. Holman would have known I had the kid’s best interest in mind. With this new guy, though, I was just an outsider who wanted to walk away with his prodigy. I had a better shot getting the straight dope from Jiri Suk. In Philly back in ’89, Marks played on a line with Suk, who was then still a teenager and on stardom’s threshold. Even though they went their different ways, even though Suk had made over a hundred million bucks over his career and burned through just about all of it, Suk became a rookie all over again when he looked at Marks. Even though Marks was just a scout these days, a bit player in the grand scheme of things, Suk looked at him as one of the wise men.
Suk was one of the first out of the dressing room. Priority showering must have been in his contract, a smart move given that most KHL arenas at game’s end have just enough hot water to top up a teapot. The coaches lagged behind and drained Stolch after a 4-1 loss that dropped Metallurg to the bottom of the KHL standings.
Marks and Suk exchanged handshakes and shoulder bumps.
“They don’t pay you enough when you have to wear that,” Suk said, grabbing Marks’s ski jacket by the sleeve. “I buy you a good coat, okay?”
Marks laughed and then introduced me. I had played against Suk a few times and met him once at a meeting of the players’ association reps during the lockout. I had also passed a few nights on scouting trips to Prague in bars wallpapered with photos of Suk. He was a national hero, not just for his magic skills on the ice but as front man for a chain of beer halls.
“I need to talk to Dmitrov,” I said.
“I don’t see him morning at team breakfast,” Suk said. “He’s not at morning skate. Nobody see him today. I know the coaches they look all day.”
“Who’s his roommate?” I asked, hoping management put him with a veteran, the usual drill. No dice.
“Belov was.” That amounted to a vacancy at the inn and, on my end, a thoroughly dead end.
“Do you know anything about his agent?” I asked. I kept it open-ended. If I had said Buckhold, Beck, or anyone else, maybe even Salnikov, Suk might have just nodded and Yeah-Yeahed me.
“I don’t know, not my agent,” Suk said. “What Dmitrov tells me the other day he stays in the KHL. He says no way is he coming to L.A.”
S-H-I-T. Exactly what I didn’t need to hear.
“Why doesn’t he want to come to L.A?” I asked him. “The Olympic team?”
“No, he want to go to L.A. and the league. He is young kid. The good ones, they want to go. More chicks.”
If anyone could understand motives of the gifted child going west, it would have been Suk, not because they played for the same team but because he had been the very same kid twenty-three years ago.
“So what’s going on?”
Suk sighed, and I could see he was searching for words and his English had developed a thick coat of rust since he first came over to the KHL two seasons before. “Somebody, how do you say…get him.”
“ ‘Somebody gets to him.’ ”
If it had only been me, I would have been all for it.
“So is Magnitogorsk squeezing him to stay?” I said. Team owners in the KHL have been known to threaten to make life miserable for a kid’s family back home if he bolts. The threats aren’t always idle.
My attempt to connect the dots was poorly drawn and heading in the wrong direction.
“No, I don’t know where he was talking about but it’s not Metallurg,” Suk said. “He said he’s not staying in Magnitogorsk. He said he has to move and Belov is, was, asking if he can stay with me when Dmitrov leaves.”
“And you didn’t hear anything about where?”
“No. Magnitogorsk or anywhere in Russia, he doesn’t want to stay.”
“Did you see Dubinin around him?” I took a chance on Suk knowing him. If he had talked to Dmitrov about going to L.A., the kid probably would have mentioned him.
“Yeah,” Suk said. “He came to Magnitogorsk twice, in September, in November. I remember November. He was at Dmitrov’s birthday party at his house.”
“And?”
“I guessed they talked. He talked to Belov too.”
“And that’s all?”
Jiri Suk mumbled a “Dunno.” He had the look of a guy who had reached the limit of what he knew for a fact. He was able to put other stuff together, but he wasn’t going to put it together for us. Minding your own business on any team is a good idea and especially in the KHL. Suk didn’t want to get Dmitrov in any trouble or any deeper shit than he was already in. It seemed like the right point to switch gears and ask him about a kid he couldn’t hurt.
“Did you talk to Belov much?”
“A good kid,” Suk said. “He had a chance to play in the league.”
Suk really knew how to hurt a scout: remind him of a great pick that he’d never be able to dine out on.
“I was doing my best to give him that chance,” I said. “What happened last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, what do you think happened?”
“It’s tough to talk about.”
I wanted to say, “For fuck sakes.” I didn’t need the preface to get my point across.
“You know what’s tough to talk about?” I said. “It’s tough to talk about a kid’s death with his brother and sister-in-law, the only family he had. I had to go to their apartment. That’s where I was today. I’m going to have to go back there again. They want to know what happened. I don’t know what to tell them. So if you know something, anything…”
I let it hang out there a couple of seconds to collect some guilt or shame.
“I know Belov was on a program, he told me,” Suk said. “I can see that. I know. Dmitrov too, I think, but I don’t ask. Not my business, just his business. Maybe I was young now, I do it too. Maybe have to.”
Suk didn’t have to spell it out but he was talking about steroids, maybe human growth hormone. I suspected as much. Belov had been just a scrawny kid when I first saw him, but on video of KHL games I had watched before heading to Moscow, Belov looked like he had added around fifteen pounds of muscle. Dmitrov was also bigger than he had been in his draft year but not quite such an extreme case.
There’s only so much the weight room can do and kettle bells and the squat rack only go so far. I had mixed feelings about Juice. I would never tell a kid what to do or what not to do. You hit eighteen and you can sign your own name on a contract or go to war or whatever. You hit eighteen and you get to make choices. Juice, it’s one of those choices. This, though, might not have been so clear-cut, not if it hadn’t been a choice he made alone. If a team, if a coach, if an agent or anyone else was in his ear and telling him he had to go with Vitamin S, had to, it was criminal. Jail would be too good for anyone who pushed a kid, threatened him, into pumping himself up with black-market stuff spilling out of unregulated labs. I didn’t know that this was how it played out with Belov and Dmitrov but if it had been, then you could build a good criminal case of reckless endangerment. If it had anything to do with Belov’s death, then it would be boosted up to manslaughter.
I asked Suk for his cell number and I gave him mine and told him to call if Dmitrov reappeared on the scene. He seemed to put it together that he wouldn’t just be doing me a favour but maybe the kid too.
The rest of the team and the coaches started to board the bus. Suk shook Marks’s hand and mine and we went our separate ways.
Ivan pulled his car around the back of the arena. Marks asked me what I thought about what Suk had told us. I told him a few things bothered me. A few things just didn’t fit.
One thing bothered me somewhat: the fact that Dubinin never mentioned any conversation with Dmitrov. He didn’t say a word to me. He never made an entry on the database. Calculated or just casually neglectful, I couldn’t say. Whatever, he kept up the appearance of having no interest in the kid at all, even though I had nudged him, apparently for naught, in that direction.
Another thing was a half-inch from flush: the absence of any game reports from Magnitogorsk for the dates Suk had given me. Suk wouldn’t have had the dates wrong. I knew Dmitrov’s birthday fell in early November. Any scout knows the birthday of his first rounder, having read his bio material. It’s always there right beside the name. The date stuck out for me because Dmitrov was only a few weeks away from being eligible for the previous year’s draft.
But a third thing smelled really rotten: Dubinin never filed expenses for trips to Magnitogorsk in September or November. He filed expenses from other trips he had made over that stretch, and I had gone through them looking for caviar breakfasts. He wouldn’t have gone out of his own pocket for a trip to Magnitogorsk, and he hadn’t gone out of mine. That meant that he had gone out of someone else’s.
Russia is a good place to try your moral relativism. I was prepared to accept it as a fact that Dubinin could have been working the middle against the two sides. If he was the third man in some sort of deal, I could hold my nose if it worked out to L.A.’s benefit. This was different, though. Dubinin’s stealth suggested he was working the middle against two sides and L.A. wasn’t either of them. We had been paying him, and not only was he working for others but working for others against us.
If he hadn’t already been scattered like so much confetti in his driveway, I wouldn’t have minded wiring his ride.
16
I had the cab wait for us outside a Japanese restaurant. Moscow might seem like the last place you’d want to go to for sushi but the Russians are batshit crazy for cold fish. The wasabi ice cream didn’t agree with me, and I wouldn’t have minded just turning in for the night. It had been one of the longer days of my life, but I had told Kelly Markham that I’d set him up for the night. When Marks told Ivan that we were going to the Boar’s Head Bar, the Russian’s mouth tensed so his thin lips disappeared.
“How long we stay?” Ivan asked.
“You have wife and kids?” I said, looking for any reason to cut it short.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll find yourself another wife,” Marks said. “Maybe just for tonight.”
“I send message I am late,” Ivan said, and he fired off a text with the nervous energy of a guy worried that the truth looked too much like a cover story.
While Ivan secured his release, I pulled out my phone, looked through my contacts list, and found an email address that Dmitrov had given me at the draft. I kept it simple and I kept it in all-caps in case a kid used to the Cyrillic alphabet might struggle with lower case:
I AM IN MOSCOW. WENT TO GAME TO TALK TO YOU. PLEASE MESSAGE OR CALL ME AT THIS NUMBER.
On the ride over to the Boar’s Head, I tried to mute the little voice in my head telling me that a kid who goes AWOL might not be inclined to message back.
I also messaged Polo. I asked him to Google search Dmitrov in Russian. I gave Polo the bare bones, told him that Golden Boy had gone out of the pocket. In Polo’s case the all-caps was intended to communicate urgency.
SEE IF THERES NEWS 4 DMITROV. PERSONAL LINKS. WHATEVER.
Polo isn’t quite conversational in Russian, but then again he’s not conversational even in his native Czech. He had told me that he had read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in their original form back in his university days. I half-bought it.
Polo was back to me within the minute.
You get me team contract, yes?
17
A lot of booze, blood, and semen have been spilled at the Boar’s Head. Calling it “a bar” doesn’t do it justice. Yeah, foreigners come for the beer while the locals get into the hard stuff, but to get their orders in they have to sidle up to the counter and make their way through a thicket of tail. All the girls are dizzyingly tall, impossibly leggy, and dubiously blond. They wear a look of malign boredom until a guy who has a whiff of money approaches. They stand, lean, and loiter two deep on a slow night and, in the absence of a benefactor, any of them can nurse a drink that she bought at 9 P.M. until the sun comes up on the shortest winter day. Customers have to time their toilet breaks because it can take five minutes to weave thirty or forty feet between them en route to the head. And wise customers hold on to their wallets and valuables when making those pit stops because a few of the girls rank among Moscow’s top distaff pickpockets. Lesser talents want men to pick up their drinks, buy smokes, and, if amorous, donate as they see fit. To a one they claim to be students, although none have declared majors, and a hundred bucks American is viewed as an acceptable but not overgenerous donation to their college funds. It’s unkind if not inaccurate to call the girls hookers. I have always liked to think of it as a floorshow, and there’s nothing more entertaining than watching a morbidly obese German sex tourist lose his wallet, his watch, and then his manhood to a lightning-fingered, bar-stool seductress.
The Boar’s Head had been my haunt in my stint with Spartak. It looked exactly like I had left it. Okay, maybe the blonds by the bar were the little sisters of the ones I’d seen nightly back in 2001, but still. I did a double take when I caught the eye of one: she was a ringer for the twin sisters, who, for a glorious time, used to take turns cooking my breakfasts after all-night doubleheaders.
You can get into as much trouble as you want at the Boar’s Head and sometimes more than you need. The staff reserve tables for princes of the Russian Thugocracy and any one of them might be attached somehow to a girl you’re talking to. The attachment might be affectionate or professional or both. Some burn when they spot a foreigner even eyeing one of the motherland’s natural resources.
