The third man in, p.8
The Third Man In, page 8
Back in my Spartak days I struck up a fast friendship with one of the owners of the Boar’s Head, a guy who fled from New York to Moscow, one step ahead of his creditors, authorities, and a few guys who abide by Omertà. “If I go back to the States, I’m going to be ten pounds of ash in an urn,” he had told me. I had told him his name would still be on a Detain List at U.S. Customs.
Ray was a proprietor like other proprietors. He had an inflated sense of the place. He thought of the Boar’s Head as the Rick’s Café of post-Soviet Moscow. Sleaze and disease made it closer to Plato’s Retreat or the Chicken Ranch. I found him at his table by the door and sat down with him while Marks recklessly went to the bar on something just short of a dead run. Ivan followed in his boss’s wake after he looked out the window to make sure his car was being safely minded by the valets and not stripped down for parts or stolen.
“Long time, so what brings you in, Shadow?” Ray said.
“The usual, some games to scout. The unusual, a couple of funerals.”
“Yeah, shit, that was an awful thing that happened to Dubinin. He was still working for L.A., right?”
“So I understand,” I said. “You know him?”
“Yeah, lots do.”
Ray had managed to adopt a Russian inscrutability, but he hadn’t mastered it.
“So how well do you know him?”
“Oh no, I mean, he went to the better clubs, the one-hundred-percent Russian ones,” Ray hemmed, and I cut him off before he hawed.
“This place is better than a lot of those clubs for a couple of things,” I said. I made a point of looking over at the blonds looking over at patrons, me included.
“Yeah, well, he did come in when he had some business and he did have a girl he did business with, lotsa business.”
“Any way you can find her for me?”
“It looks like she’s found you herself.”
And by the time Ray said that, I thought I had spotted her. Yeah, the one who looked like the twins’ sister. She attempted a languid hypnosis from across the room. My eyelids weren’t getting heavy and I wasn’t getting sleepy, but at least I was getting a laugh out of it.
“That her? The one on the end?”
“No, that’s her friend, used to be her roommate, I hear. The tall one beside her.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. I saw nothing friendly between them. They seemed to be ignoring each other and didn’t exchange a word.
Ray coloured inside the lines. “See those pearls…they’re real. Dubinin staked her those,” he said.
“Yeah, like a dog pissing to stake out his territory.”
“ ’Xactly.”
“She’s a real champion to be out here, tonight.”
“They’re different than you and me,” Ray said. Two decades into his stay in Russia, Ray’s wisdom had been so honed. Everything had come back to that: they’re different.
Ray gave me the name of the tall girl with the pearls: Anastasia. A handle, I figured, probably born Olga or something not quite so grand. She was young enough to be age-inappropriate for Dubinin. She was over 6’3” in her spiky heels and her lank platinum blond hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. She looked like a catwalk model in fifteen-grand worth of Chanel’s latest line while all the girls around her were wearing knock-offs of lesser designers. She was an elongated update of Brigitte Nielsen from Rocky IV.
Ray gave me her friend’s name: Daria. She was four inches shorter allowing for heels, four shades less blond, a little less convincing, a little less thrilled with herself and her prospects. And, of course, I found her twice as attractive as her friend. Not in the classical sense. Just that I understood her in a look: the State of Me Nowadays. Not deeply flawed, just nicely flawed, perfectly imperfect.
By the time Marks was back at our table, he was down to the last eighth of an inch of a triple Johnnie Walker Black. I introduced him to Ray, and Ray didn’t extend his hand. His sensor had been activated. He didn’t know Marks by name but recognized trouble, past, present, or incoming. Ray excused himself and said he had to get back to business. He didn’t really, though. He just wanted away from Marks.
“What do you think is up with your kid, too shook up to dress tonight?” Marks said.
I didn’t say anything. My mind was somewhere else, and even though Marks was half-snapped he did pick up my staring contest with Daria.
“See something you like, Shadow?”
“An opportunity,” I said.
“What about the Leaning Tower of Piece o’ Ass beside her?” he said, nodding toward Anastasia.
“Sounds like she was taken.”
“She was…by your late buddy there.”
“You know about her and Dubinin?”
“Ivan pointed her out,” he said. “She smiled at me. Ruskies like older men.”
“The better to roll,” I said.
18
I said hi to her. She said hi back. I offered to buy her a drink and she had never turned one down, though I had a good fifteen years and more on her. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my table and she said yes and moved quickly, as if she had taken a number at the door and I had called it after a long wait. I sympathized with her. She had been standing all night. She had been standing all night all week. She had been standing all her adult life.
Daria’s outfit, once slinky and shiny, had come as an expensive gift from a businessman, but he stopped coming to the Boar’s Head without notice long ago and the gift degraded and decayed with nightly wear, just like memories.
I asked her what she did.
“I am student.”
“You don’t have twin sisters, do you?”
“How you say, cousins?” Filed under Inconclusive but Promising. A get-together for Old Times’ Sake…I snapped out of the reverie.
“How old are you?” I asked guiltily.
“Twenty-four,” she lied.
Fact is, nobody is twenty-four, not in this bar, not in this netherworld. There were babies who had no business being there and others trying and failing to find twenty-four again. She wasn’t lying up.
“Are you married?” she asked.
I told her I wasn’t. No one she had ever asked told her he was.
I looked over at the bar. Marks was the nearest thing to my ball and chain on this misspent night. I was married to him for better or much worse, starting in health that night, ending inevitably in sickness in the morning. He had wedged himself in a cluster of blonds. The pickpockets hit lint. Marks had given me his passport, wallet, and a thin wedge of folding money. Daria followed my eyes and she wasn’t impressed.
“Your friend do same as you?”
“We have the same job, if that’s what you mean.”
Daria could read men almost without error. Like a guy who guesses weights and ages at a fair, she could do an instant assessment of a night’s prospects and a life’s. Like other girls at the Boar’s Head, she was only fooled by men when she wanted to remind herself what innocence was like, when she made it a game, a masquerade, an escape. She could see that Marks was faded semi-glory, broken in a way and never assembled in another. She could see that he had given up caring about some things entirely and everything at some level. She was too strong, too hardened, to feel sorry for herself, no way was she going to feel sorry for him. He hadn’t stood in spiky heels for eight or ten or twelve hours at the end of leers and gropes.
“And your other friend?” Daria pointed to Ivan.
“Ivan is a good man,” I guessed.
She seemed unconvinced and uninterested in a Russian who wasn’t Somebody.
“You live with your family?” I asked. I saw no sense letting her know what I knew.
“I lived with my friend, there. Soon she leaves and so I must find another apartment. I move week before.” She waved her hand over her shoulder. She could gaze through a one-hundred-inch telescope and pick up distant stars burning a thousand years ago, but she couldn’t see anything shining dimly in her own past. She could chart one hundred horoscopes and her stars would never align in a way that predicted a bright future.
I knew how these girls lived from those who might have been her twin cousins. Daria’s story was the story of all those at the bar. She would have to find a cold-water flat in bad disrepair and another roommate to share it. She would keep it spotless, as if that lent her lot in life a little dignity. She looked at me, me being a type and a ticket, and she tried to picture what the inside of an American-style hotel would look like. She had heard about them from friends who had met foreigners at the Boar’s Head. She listened to them like a poor child on a playground who was hearing reports from a lucky little bastard who was back from Disneyworld.
“Why is your friend leaving? Getting married, maybe?”
“Anastasia has opportunity in another country, she goes.”
“To where?”
“To Austria, to work in embassy.”
Dropping “embassy” in a conversation gave it away. Her English was passable even with practice only at the bar, but she could speak French and German fluently. Daria was the one girl in the room who actually had been a university student. Anastasia hadn’t needed good marks and a diploma to land such a cushy job. Her looks were enough to give her a start, and her physical and moral flexibility put her on the fast track. Daria couldn’t hide the indignation even if she tried, and she didn’t.
“That’s tough for you. Anastasia couldn’t find you a job?”
“She could find me a job that uses a shovel. She is lucky that her man does this important job, knows many powerful people, finds her embassy job…”
“And then he dies, not so lucky for him,” I said. No surprise registered with her. She supposed I was operating on info relayed by Ray. That made her a little more expansive.
“Someone who can do those things for a woman, someone will always be mad. He dies. This thing happens.”
“Not you?” She didn’t seem too broken up. Or broken up at all.
“I am happy for my friend to go, she does not have him now, better without, something new.”
Frost formed on happy. Sharing an apartment, they lived in close quarters. Anastasia’s good fortune had put twelve time zones between friends.
“I’m surprised your friend Anastasia came out here. Will she go to the funeral?”
“She is unknown to the wife.”
Maybe her former roommate was unknown to Mrs. D but easily imagined. His widow had to have known exactly what a pussyhound Dubinin was. Not even Anastasia could have imagined that she was the Other Woman, just the Latest Other Woman.
I suspected Daria knew Dubinin only well enough to write his definitive unauthorized biography. I contributed to the chapter on his love life and told her what I knew. I told her how Dubinin kissed and gloated. How he liked to talk about his conquests when he showed up at our team meetings before the draft. How he dropped a year’s pay on high-end call girls in L.A. and rolled them by us in a hotel bar like tanks on a May Day parade. How he bagged Galvin’s wife. I had thought he only did that with our staff, geography and the language barrier providing an easy way to compartmentalize his infidelities. I had that wrong.
Daria lit up a cigarette. She said that Anastasia heard the same stories, had seen him with other women, and had to eat shit and smile for her chance to get out of the Boar’s Head and land in Vienna. She said Anastasia pretended that Dubinin’s tomcat act turned her on. I suspected she might not be pretending, but I held my tongue. Only one issue really mattered.
“Who wanted him dead?”
“Who wanted him to live? Anastasia, yes, but others, I don’t know.”
I walked the perimeter of what she might know, what Anastasia might have talked about: Dubinin’s travels to Magnitogorsk, his dealings with Dmitrov, Dmitrov going AWOL. She drew blanks, all genuine. His work in hockey hadn’t piqued her interest. Again, she said she doubted Anastasia could help me. She didn’t care about his work, just his clout. Dubinin wouldn’t have shared any of his business with her.
I bought Daria more drinks. I bought her a couple of packs of cigarettes. I wished the Boar’s Head had a duty-free because I would have bought her more. I might be hopeless but I’m not shameless. She was too young for me, I thought, even though she wasn’t as young as she claimed, even though she felt older than she really was. I wished she had been around when I landed in Moscow ten years before.
СУББОТА
SATURDAY
1
Back in his playing days, Kelly Markham had landed in the type of trouble that visits only the charming because only the charming are invited inside the velvet ropes. He had landed in the type of trouble that only the well-heeled and well-born can afford because only they can afford to forget it. But then Marks got busted at customs in Montreal with a dealer’s weight of Colombian high-test. He always maintained it was a frame job by the husband of the woman who days before had ordered room service to Kelly’s suite. Her husband, a New York real estate mogul, managed to keep her name out of the press and had used his schlep to get Marks Page Sixed in the Post. People remembered him getting perp-walked in cuffs after that one. People still whispered about him when he walked into a room, even when he was in earshot.
I knew Kelly better than them. I knew he had an unhealthy selection of vices. As far as I knew, he never went for nose candy and never needed for money, so he was an unlikely mule. I also knew that a couple of four-week trips to Minnesota to find a cure had ended a week early.
Marks drank to go deaf to the whispers and maybe it worked. Maybe that managed to put his personal history out of his mind. Probably not in a lead-lined box with a big lock securing it, but at least under a thick white sheet that you could still see the outline through. At the Boar’s Head, every drink pulled that sheet back an inch more, a revived memory poured out with the splash after every skimpy shot. I was the worst company he could have had. He’d probably be better with complete strangers. With me he felt obliged to talk. With me he identified what might be a last chance at another last chance.
“You know how it is, Shadow, right.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there,” I said. I looked the other way for help that I knew wasn’t coming.
“I mean, I’ve done a good job in Vancouver. They should have no complaints. Not the picks we made.”
I didn’t doubt they were his picks and he knew I knew, but he understood that the people who signed his cheques preferred the first person plural. He was hammering home the point because he was hoping that he and I could become “us” when his contract with Vancouver expired.
“God bless Paulie Ford,” he said. “A good guy. I mean, without him I’m not in this business. And I mean, Paulie, Paulie took some heat for hiring me. Newspaper guys listing everything that happened to me like it was an obituary they were writing. Paulie told me, ‘Tune it out, do a good job, and it’ll go away.’ ”
I told him that’s how it was going to play out eventually. I lied. The stories, twenty years old, even more, stuck to him like Velcro.
“You know what Buchanan did?”
“Yeah, I know.”
Marks had a steam on so he had to tell me anyway.
“Day One, press conference, you know, the big roll-out. Says what a great guy Paulie is, ‘Hockey man, example to us all, still so useful to this organization as a consultant…’ Even though he’s moved Paulie’s office into the janitor’s closet. Then the bastard’s asked what’re his plans and he says, no lie, ‘We’re going to do a better job procuring players in the draft.’ ”
I was listening, though I couldn’t bring myself to listen as hard as he hoped.
“I mean, here we are, make it to the second round year before and we make it with half the team, half, guys that we drafted while I was there. We got all kinds of contract problems that have nothing to do with me and a room like it’s the Caine Mutiny or something, and this bastard’s pointing at the scouting department.”
I looked heavenward. For help for him, he thought.
“I mean, Shadow, there’s no clearing the air with shit like that. It’s one thing to have your crew that you take with you wherever you go. Your buddies, ones you know and trust. I get that. But throwing me under the bus…”
I had my hand around my drink and it vibrated when he slammed his glass on the bar.
“No clearing the air. Shit, the UN has rules against using gas like that in wars, right. I mean, shit, I walk into his office and even if I don’t breathe it in, exposed skin gets burnt.”
He sighed.
“I put feelers out, Shadow. I mean, to be honest, who among us wouldn’t, right?”
I nodded and was about to say something to change the subject. He didn’t give me a chance.
“I mean, right now my prospects are looking blacker than this.”
I winced just at the sight of the triple Jägermeister that the bartender was unfortunately pouring him. The barkeep was about to pour me one but I put my hand over the glass he pushed in front of me.
“The worst part of it is knowing without being told, y’know, without being told, ‘Go find something else.’ That would be the decent thing to do but the bastard doesn’t even do that and leaves me hanging there. And I mean, teams aren’t hiring. They’re down-sizing everywhere and looking to bring in young guys, right, just out of the league, fresh blood, cheap, not guys like us who learned the trade. But you know all this, right?”
Like him, I did, all day and all of the night.
I should have seen it coming when the last drink led to another last drink and then another. Marks was going from a Hard Drinker to a Problem Drinker. I should have seen it coming when I tugged on Marks’s arm, gently once, harder next, until he stopped leering at girls’ asses. I felt my scalp was getting irritated. I was bumped by a waiter and turned around. Five uglies were getting up at their table and were lasering the back of my head with hard stares. I tried to figure out which genus of Russian thugs they belonged to. Not Dirty Street Life: they exercised too much self-control. There would have been no slow burn. Not Soldiers on Leave: they were wearing Italian shoes they couldn’t have bought on soldiers’ pay. I didn’t have time and enough information to make more conclusive calls. It’s tough to sort out unlawful criminals and lawful ones, those trying to beat The Man and those working for Him. Not that it mattered, not when the walls were closing in on us. The Boar’s Head seats five hundred or so but now felt tighter than the visitors’ dressing room at Maple Leaf Gardens.
