The petrov ledger, p.43
The Petrov Ledger, page 43
I sat in the desk’s chair. There had to be something here. I realized now the part of the carving with the Cyrillic lettering was not actually a part of the carving. It was carved into the front of the desk. As I placed a finger on the first letter, I discovered exactly how well made this was. It was nearly impossible to see, but every individual character in the inscription was an individual tile. You could depress every character separately. That had to be the lock. Now I just had to find the key.
I looked at the inscription again.
Лето-Осень 1831 Квадрата Дворца Санкт-Петербург
Leto-Osen' 1831 Kvadrata Dvortsa Sankt-Peterburg
Summer-Fall 1831 Palace Square Saint Petersburg
I pushed on the “L”. The key depressed, stayed depressed for a moment, and then popped back out. I clicked the “E” and the process repeated. It was the same with the “T”. I clicked on the “O”. The key stayed depressed. I waited a full ten seconds. The “O” stayed depressed. The others had popped out after just a second or two. It was either broken or I had discovered that a word puzzle was the key which opened this lock. If I clicked the right letters in the right order, they would stay depressed and something would be revealed in the safe, probably a false back.
I had an idea of what the word was. It wasn’t actually a word. It was a name. It was time to test out my idea.
The “O” was already pressed. I hit the “L” and smiled as both keys stayed down. I continued to the “G” and the “A”. So far, so good. I hit the “P” and all of the keys popped back out. Crap.
I thought the key was Andrei’s first wife. The one he never got over losing. It had to be. “Olga” worked. If it wasn’t “Petrova”, I was stumped. It wasn’t Petrova because pushing the “P” undid the whole thing.
I knew from my earlier investigation of Andrei Petrov that no information existed on his family other than Dmitri. Andrei had gone to great lengths to insure his current family was protected and his first family would exist only in the memory of those who knew them. Still, there had to be an official record somewhere. Fortunately, I had a contact within the Federal police force of Russia who would likely have access to those records. I checked my watch and did the math. One in the afternoon here meant it was nine in St. Petersburg. I took a chance and placed a call to Major Vasilov.
He answered on the second ring. He greeted me and said he really hadn’t expected me to call for help so soon. I told him the only help I required was some information. He said he’d help if he could.
I asked him the name of Andrei Petrov’s first wife. He wasn’t sure off hand, but he knew the information was here somewhere. The full history of Andrei Petrov was required reading before he was allowed to go in undercover. He still had copies of some records at home. He found what he was looking for.
“Her name was Olga. Her father was Karstad Pavlov. So, her name would have been Olga Karstadovna Petrova.”
In Cyrillic, her name was Олга Карстадовна Петрова
I thanked him for his help. A cursory scan of the letters in the inscription told me I was likely on the right track. It certainly looked as though I could type in the name of Andrei’s late wife without needing any letter in the carving more than once. I’d even have some letters left over.
I punched in the letters. I used the letters up in the order they appeared in the inscription. They all stayed pushed in. I depressed the last “A”. I heard a click and watched the back of the safe pivot on the hidden hinge and fall against the drawer. The former safe’s back was kept from resting flush with the drawer by rubber stoppers I had felt upon inspection. There was a hidden compartment in the safe and it was anything but empty. I reached inside and put everything on the desk to go through.
From the hidden compartment, I had pulled a Russian passport, a magnifying glass, a photo album, and fifty thousand dollars in bank-wrapped one hundred dollar bills.
The passport was a Russian passport for a Kiril Anisimov. The photo on it was of Andrei Petrov. I wondered if Major Vasilov knew about this alias for the Clever Bear. I’d clue him in later.
The photo album started with black and white wedding photos of a young beautiful light haired girl and a young Andrei Petrov. The date on the photos was June 1956. I could see Dmitri in the younger face of Andrei. There were photos of their honeymoon in Moscow. There were family photos of Andrei, his wife, and a baby from ‘58. The photos switched from black and white to color for a 1964 photo that revealed the family had added a daughter. By ’64, the baby had become a strapping young man. You could see his father in his eyes. The rest of the album tracked the family as the children grew and the family prospered. You could see a change in the style and quality of the clothing they wore. The vacations they took started to branch out from the Soviet Union to Europe and America. There was even a picture of the family in front of this very house in 1972. The last photo was from 1974. Olga Karstadovna had posed her children with her husband. A suitcase stood in the background. There was a ticket in the pocket of Andrei’s crisp pin-stripe suit. I would bet money it was a ticket to Moscow. This was the last photo he had of his children from his first marriage. I grabbed the magnifying glass to try to read what was on the ticket. That was odd. The magnifying glass didn’t magnify anything. Nothing was enlarged or clarified by the glass. In fact, it obscured parts of the photo.
I held the magnifying glass out away from me. I was working on a theory here. I checked the bills while looking through the glass. Again, there was no magnification happening here. Some of the serial numbers and other writings on the bills seemed blurry or just out of focus. My theory was looking better all the time.
It was the magnifying glass that was the piece of the puzzle Andrei had hidden in the safe.
We were done here. I pushed the door to the secret compartment in the safe closed. The letters on the inscription popped back out. Ingenious.
We took everything from the secret compartment with us. I wasn’t sure what use there would be for a false passport and a photo album, but I thought we could find something to do with fifty thousand dollars.
Something told me this was the last piece of the puzzle. The scavenger hunt was over.
I re-locked the safe and closed the wooden door. We made the walk back to Front Street and Mary Jane’s condo. The first thing I did was grab the Ledger. OK, that’s not right. The first thing I did was put down the photo album on a desk in Mary Jane’s computer room. That was where we had left the Ledger and the lens rig. Then, I put on the lens rig and grabbed the Ledger. I opened it to page two.
With the lens rig on, every character on the page showed up through the magnifying glass. I had absolutely no idea how they had done this.
Maybe they worked it backwards. Maybe they wrote everything out through the magnifying glass then made sure things were only partially visible when various parts of the lens rig were assembled. I knew it had taken a lot of work. I also knew I couldn’t read this. It was Russian Cyrillic, but was beyond my translation abilities. I could make out enough words to get the general idea, though. This was Andrei Petrov’s life story.
His story ran for about four hundred hand-written pages. Then, the pages were blank again. The writing picked up fifty pages later. It was indeed Andrei Petrov’s life story. The second batch of writing was in English. I scanned through the story. Andrei felt that he had led a very interesting life. He certainly had no issues with diminished ego. There was a surprising level of self-doubt for one who was so sure of himself. The English version of his autobiography ran around four hundred hand-written pages as well. As that story ended, there were more blank pages.
About a nine hundred pages in, the Ledger actually started looking like a ledger. It was all nicely tabled with crisp clear lines. There were columns for names, dates, places, and amounts. There was even a column for notes about the transactions. Even I recognized some of the names on here. This was the history of payoffs made by Andrei Petrov starting in 1952. The last entry was dated just prior to his death in 2009.
One transaction jumped out at me. It was dated 1974 and made to none other than the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time; Leonid Brezhnev. The payment was made in Moscow. The note said невмешательство, nevmeshatel'stvo, I wasn’t familiar with that word. The translator program said it meant non-interference. The date in ’74 would have perfectly fit with the arrest and relocation of his family. There was a blank line following that transaction with only the notes column filled out. It said преданный. Predannyy means betray, or in this case betrayed.
Wow. Did that ever suck. He went to Moscow to buy off Brezhnev and keep him out of his Family’s business. Brezhnev used his presence in Moscow to round up his real family in St. Petersburg.
There were several payments after to what I took to be judges or local party officials. The notes always had the Russian word for “freedom” followed by a question mark. In the margin after the notes column, every entry was accompanied by нет, nyet. No. Andrei spent the better part of five years trying to buy his family’s freedom. He spent millions of rubles and was told “no” every single time.
The “ledger” portion of the Ledger ran for about three hundred pages. Then, the pages were blank. On the last page before the cutout that had been made to hide the glasses were written four bank account numbers, the location of the bank, and access codes for the accounts.
The Petrov Ledger, as so many items of myth, was everything everyone thought it to be and then some. Everyone was right, but wrong, about its contents. The ones who said it was his life history were right. No doubt that life history could serve as a blueprint for setting up a criminal organization. Also correct were the ones who said it detailed payments made to further his criminal ends. The last page confirmed that Andrei Petrov had squirreled away money in offshore bank accounts. I don’t believe anyone thought it would prove to have everything that was rumored to be there in nineteen hundred ninety one pages.
We didn’t want anyone to know what we had just yet, not even the Shark. We called for a cab to the airport and took the charter back to its home in Newark.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
Mary Jane called her Uncle Steve when we were about an hour out from Newark. I spent the three-hour flight reading the English language version of Andrei Petrov’s autobiography. Mary Jane sat beside me and read a book of her own.
Andrei stretched a rambling, detail rich tale from his birth in Leningrad in 1932, through the Siege where he learned his talent for stealthy acquisition, and out the other side to his early days running contraband for a local black market dealer. I had just gotten to the part where he was beginning to construct his own criminal empire when we landed. It was good reading.
We were met on the tarmac and driven to the Shark Tank. I didn’t have the same level of fear of the place as I had the first time we came here. I’d learned enough about Steven “The Shark” Caputo to lose most of the fear. He had risked quite a bit helping me in the quest for the Ledger. I had no illusions it was all for my benefit. Much of what he did was to protect Mary Jane. Still, he was a man that was as good as his word. He had helped me out. I had lost much of the fear I had of “The Shark”, but had gained a ton of respect for Steven Caputo.
As we pulled up in front of the mansion, we had all expected “The Shark” to be waiting patiently in his office for us. Instead, he waited at the front door. He rushed out to us as soon as the car pulled to a stop. Mary Jane exited first. She walked right into a bear hug from her uncle. Ray and I got out while they embraced. Steve gave his niece a kiss on the cheek and then greeted Ray with a handshake. The Shark placed his left hand on Ray’s shoulder. I thought for a moment that Ray would be the recipient of a bear hug as well. Instead, he leaned in and whispered something to Ray. Ray looked shocked and cast a rather evil glance my way.
It was my turn next. I extended my hand. Steve ignored it and I got the bear hug from the Shark it appeared Ray would get. He whispered in my ear that I was as good as my word before he released me.
He invited Mary Jane and me to get settled in her room while he talked to Ray. The Shark was bunking his niece and me together. I thought it to be a very progressive attitude on his part. He hadn’t even asked about the Ledger yet. He trusted we had it and had solved its riddle.
Mary Jane led me up to her room. She closed the door behind us. There was clearly something bothering her. I had to ask.
Her reply was one of the most cryptic things she had ever said to me. She asked me what I had learned about her and her family in my Internet searches. I explained to her what I had explained to the Shark. I had thought about looking her and her family up, but hadn’t done it. She would tell me what I needed to know in her own time. She looked very relieved and thanked me.
She sat me on the edge of the bed and grabbed my laptop. I don’t leave home without it. While it booted up, she started telling me things about herself.
She was named for her grandmothers; Mary Pierce and Jane Bailey. Her last name was not really Bailey. She had actually dropped her last name when she was graduated from high school. Mary Pierce had married Carl Lassiter. That was her family name; Lassiter. The name she had been born with was Mary Jane Bailey Lassiter.
Of course, I knew the Lassiter name. If you spend any time at all in Ohio, you know the Lassiter name. The Lassiter Group started out as a shipping company on Lake Erie around the turn of the twentieth century. It had diversified over the years to include trucking, manufacturing, electronics, publishing and nearly everything else under the sun. The Lassiter Group was a multi-national company now with offices in sixteen different countries. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Lassiter Group holding or something which had been made or moved by a holding of the Lassiter Group.
Mary Jane was one of those Lassiters.
The state of Ohio proudly pointed to the Lassiter Group as one of its all-time great business success stories. Kevin Lassiter was an Irish immigrant who started out on the Cleveland docks. He started Lassiter Shipping and made a success of it. His son Brian started the diversification and formed the Lassiter Group. Brian’s son Carl helmed the company while turning its focus to all of North America. Carl’s son James branched the Lassiter Group out into Europe, Asia, and Australia. Last year’s revenues were in the neighborhood of thirty-five billion dollars.
James Lassiter was Mary Jane’s father. After graduating high school and with her father’s consent, she had dropped the Lassiter name. She wanted to make it on her own. She didn’t want the Lassiter name to be the reason for her success. Her father assumed she would take the name back when she joined the Group. Her desire to join what she had seen as the excitement of her Uncle Steve’s business threw James a curve.
James had ranted. He had raved. He couldn’t sway his daughter from her desire to put her MBA to use in the Carlucci Family. He could have cut her off completely, but he didn’t. James Lassiter said a Lassiter’s word was as good as a contract. He had given his word to his daughter that if she went to college, got a degree, then finished out with an MBA, she would earn her trust fund. James Lassiter was worth just under forty billion dollars. He always came in number two or three on the richest man in America lists. Mary Jane wouldn’t tell me exactly how much was in her trust fund and I didn’t ask. I just accepted her assertion that money would never be a problem for her, ever.
Being a Lassiter in Cleveland yet not being part of the Lassiter Group was tough on Mary Jane. Eventually, it became too much. She was Mary Jane Bailey legally, but she would always be a Lassiter in Cleveland. So, she left. It was clear to her she was not going to be brought in to the Carlucci Family, so New York wasn’t an option. LA was too crowded. She had always loved going to Key West. She decided to see how it would be to live at the end of the road instead of just being a visitor. She had loved it, so she stayed.
Key West is a haven for expatriates of all types. She was just one more. No one there knew she was a Lassiter. She was just Mary Jane Bailey.
I told her I was pretty impressed with “just” Mary Jane Bailey.
Now, she went back to being blunt. She asked if I was impressed enough to move to Key West to be with her.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that as soon as she mentioned the Lassiter name the dollar signs filled my eyes. Not so. I had never imagined myself as a kept man. I couldn’t do so now. I told her that, as much as I would like to, I couldn’t just drop everything and move to Key West. Even to be with her. I had to at least try to make my own way.
I saw a smile break out on her face. She told me I would damn sure make my own way. She had a job. She would expect me to get one, too. It just didn’t have to be for anything except spending money. She would give me a place to stay, but she wouldn’t fund a lifestyle. She had bought the condo and she occasionally dipped into her trust to help with property taxes. She didn’t own a car and she didn’t live like some type of trust fund brat. She lived as best she could within the limits of her bartender salary at the Kraals.
I had done some really crazy things lately. I guess it was time for one more. I told her I would move to Key West.
She hugged and kissed me and led me to the laptop. She suggested I read up on her family. She would fill in the blanks and set the Internet story straight after I had read the commonly accepted version of the Lassiter family history.
While I took my crash course in the Lassiter’s, Mary Jane answered a knock on the door. It was Ray. He told her that her uncle wanted to see her. Ray looked drained, surprised, even a bit lost. As the door closed behind Mary Jane, he added “angry” to the picture. He stalked over to me with murder in his eyes.
