by Thomas Laird
Campo operates out of Frankie’s Pizza Parlor on North Devon. The front sells great thin crust pies, but in the back room you place your bets on the horses, trotters and thoroughbreds.
Viktor Rustov walks in alone, back here in the gaming room as John Campo calls it. We’re standing behind a slightly opened women’s john door, waiting to hear our cue.
“Viktor! My man!” Johnny Campo blurts out.
Tommy and I burst out of the head, and three other Homicides, our backup, storm into the gaming room behind Rustov.
“You’re all under arrest,” I tell Rustov and a half dozen other patrons.
Tommy sees Viktor going into his overcoat pocket. Spencer has the barrel of his nine millimeter against Rustov’s temple before the Russian can grab hold of whatever’s in his pocket.
“Take it out. With two fingers,” Spencer demands. “Slowly.”
Viktor pulls out a .44 magnum with a six inch barrel. He hands it gingerly to Spencer, who’s still got his weapon placed firmly against the Russian’s brow.
“You got a license, Viktor?” I smile.
The Russian doesn’t smile back.
“The gambling beef is nothing,” Tommy explains. “But you’re a convicted, now paroled, felon carrying firearms. You be going back to Joliet, bro,” Spencer smiles maliciously.
We are both taken by the width of this man. His is shaped like a concrete block. I’m glad we didn’t have to get physical with Rustov. It’s obvious why he’s the muscle for the Russians.
“You’re going back in,” I remind him. “Unless, of course, you want to do business with us.”
“What business?” Viktor grunts.
“You give us your boss and you walk on the weapons beef. You don’t, you’ve broken parole…I believe you still have a nickel left on your meter, no?” I ask.
“I don’t make deals with cops.”
“Then you can figure out who gets to be on top, in your cellblock every night.”
“I don’t make deals with cops.”
I’m thinking of Akim Tamiroff in For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“I don’t provoke.”
After another round of explaining how he’s going back to the can, we give up on Rustov. Tommy makes the call to his probation officer.
The surprise is on us. Rustov’s lawyer makes a plea that we didn’t read him his Miranda rights. I read them off the card at Campo’s place, but a judge bought his plea. The weapons thing was thrown out, and Rustov is back on the bricks. I ask Tommy who Viktor’s lawyer is, but I’m not familiar with the name. I want to hire this guy if I ever get into the shit, I tell my partner.
*
We spend six hour shifts watching Grodnov at the sprinkler place and wherever else he travels to in the day and night. We have twenty-four hour surveillance on him, to keep an eye on him and to prevent him from visiting Nadine and her family. There is no progress on getting her to pick Grodnov out of a line-up. Mrs. Grant is still in a near-catatonic state at Elgin, although I talked to the shrink there who says she approaches lucidity, now and then. He hopes she’ll break out of her near trance soon, but there’s no telling if and when it might happen.
Carlton is way dead. He was our other ace in the hole. Now he is of course in a real hole, and our living eyeballers aren’t talking. We have had the dvd examined by our forensics experts, but there is no evidence that it was Grodnov in the dvd or that he had a hand in producing it. He hasn’t stayed on the streets for all this time by being stupid.
Tommy finds us an expert on the Russian mafia at Northwestern University in Evanston. The professor’s name is Ivan Solmienko. He was educated in Moscow and he defected here back in the 1990’s. He speaks perfect English, so if you didn’t know his name was Ivan (pronounced Yvonne) you wouldn’t pick him out as a Russian.
We sit in his spacious office on the campus of Northwestern. It is late January and their trimester is in session. He has a nice little library behind where he sits. He is a sandy blond who looks more like a Scandinavian than a Russian, I think.
“So you are after Alexei Grodnov. You and the entire Russian militia, I think. I am amazed that they didn’t shoot him. But he has powerful friends, and then he married an American woman to become a citizen. This was after his time in Chino in California, I think.”
“You’re well acquainted with Grodnov?” I ask.
“I am well-read regarding the Russian mafia in the United States, yes, Lieutenant.”
“Is there anything you can tell us about him that might help us get him?” Tommy asks.
“I’m sorry. I’m not a criminal profiler. I’m a historian,” the sandy-haired Russian smiles.
“What do you know about him personally?” I ask.
“Just what you already know. That he’s ruthless. Cruel. Probably barbaric. These men are murderers and they are what a psychologist would call sociopaths. They claim to have no understanding of right and wrong. They do what they do because they do it. They need no justification for the horrible pain they inflict. These are hardened street thugs, gentlemen. When the Soviet Union fell to pieces, they were there to sweep up. They are the new vultures of the Russian countryside. Like the Mafia here in this country, they are the police for wiseguys. They protect businessmen from having harm befall their businesses. They are blackmailers and killers. They are pedophiles and procurers…”
`“Pedophiles? I thought they were these macho homophobes—“
“They can be predators too. Like American pedophiles, they are not easy to pick out…The rumor in the Russian community is that Grodnov is particularly fond of young male children. But it is just a rumor. He has never been seen with a boy. He makes it a point to flash females about him when he’s in public…But these rumors won’t leave him. The Russian community is small enough that it is difficult to escape the witness of your peers, Lieutenant.”
“He likes little boys,” Tommy repeats.
“That is the local hearsay. Yes.”
The professor goes on to give us a short history of the Chicago chapter of the Russian mafia. He tells us about ‘krysha’, about that infamous roof.
“The Russian mafia is now at the juncture where they have their own version of the Sicilian ‘omerta.’ They will be nearly impossible to crack by trying to get one of their own to turn witness against them in a court of law. It probably won’t happen. They will go to jail rather than to turn state’s evidence on each other. They indeed live by the same code the Italians used to in the 1930’s and 1940’s and 1950’s. They are throwbacks, in that sense, gentlemen. These sociopaths have only one standard of behavior, then. They keep their mouths shut. You’ll have difficulty getting witnesses against them, as I say.”
“Did you ever deal with these people directly?”
“They murdered my brother. He was militia, and they shot him, murdered him, on the street where my mother lived.”
I watch the blond professor, but no emotion crosses his face.
“His name was Arkady. He was ten years younger than I. He dreamed of coming here to America, but I was the only member of our family who ever got here.”
“Do you know who shot him?” Tommy asked.
“No. I only know it was their outfit. They have no respect for policemen, gentlemen. They think of you as buffoons, as fools. They don’t fear you and they will never cooperate with a policeman. Some of our militia wanted to treat them the way Mussolini did—he had them shot on sight. And he nearly wiped them out, until the Americans arrived in Sicily.”
We thank him for his time. He doesn’t say anything. His eyes are looking out the window at the gently falling snow. And he’s remembering his brother Arkady, I’m thinking.
*
Grodnov is not a man of habit. He has his interests to check on. There is an appliance store in Berwyn and a bodega of Russian foods in Old Town. He doesn’t bring us close to anything remotely criminal, however, in his daily journeys.
“He knows we’re tailing him. He’s made us,” Tommy
says. And I know he’s right.
“Let’s take him in,” I say.
“What for?” Spencer asks me.
“He’s got a busted turn signal,” I tell my partner.
I read him his rights. He lawyers up immediately, so we call his attorney. The attorney is in court, so his mouthpiece will send out a junior mouthpiece.
We figure we have an hour before Grodnov will be sprung on this bogus arrest.
“A turn signal? You have arrested me for a broken turn signal?”
“You know how it is,” Tommy explains. “Once you get a rep, you’ve got coppers looking at you for all kinds of things.”
“Like what?” the blond queries.
“Home videos,” I tell him.
“I’m not into movies.”
“The guy we saw had this interesting birth mark on his inner left thigh.”
“Lots of people have birthmarks…And then it could have been makeup, you know? Birthmarks are sexy, don’t you think?” the Russian grins.
“You never know what the FBI lab can come up with when they get to analyzing film,” I tell him.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. They can do all kinds of tricks with film, dvds or tapes. They can identify people who do their damnedest to stay unidentified. It’s amazing.”
“Lieutenant…I have nothing further to say to either of you until my attorney shows up. But you can be certain this will result in a harassment suit that will not please your superiors one little bit.”
“Don’t you worry about our superiors,” Tommy says. “We have every confidence that he’s just as anti-busted-turn-signal as we are.”
“Every time you go out, we’ll be there. You go near the girl and her family, we’ll put you away for the rest of your life,” I warn Grodnov.
But true to his sociopath personality, it doesn’t phase him at all.
The junior lawyer shows up and has his client sprung in another twenty minutes. The junior attorney, Randall McMahon, threatens a harassment suit against us and the CPD, and then he walks his client out the doors.
“I don’t provoke,” I say outloud.
“Huh?” Tommy asks.
We maintain the watch on Grodnov and Rustov. Nothing is turning up for us. Rustov neatly sidestepped the beef on his .44 magnum, and Grodnov waltzed out of Headquarters on the shaky shit with the turn signal. And the Captain leaves me an e-mail that reminds me I’m not a traffic cop.
*
I used to sit in the squad with Doc Gibron for hour after hour listening to Doc’s jazz on FM stations in Chicago. Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk and Oscar Petersen and Ramsey Lewis and John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond…We listened for hours while we waited for a perp to do something we could arrest him for. All those surveillances, all those hours. And now Tommy Spencer shared the squad with me. And Natalie sat in the back seat.
We watched Grodnov and Rustov. We saw their daily habits, but we could catch them doing nothing illegal. I’d had my one broken turn signal. The next time it had to be legit. Even the Captain had a limited sense of humor about weak beefs with the perps. We would have to have something serious to arrest these two for. The jollies and the phony rousts were over.
On a night in February we followed Alexei to Old Town. We saw him pull over to a curb and we saw him talking to some street kid about thirteen years old. This happened on a night when Grodnov thought he’d shaken us off from tailing him at about 2:00 AM on a Wednesday morning.
The adolescent got into his black mid-sized SUV. He pulled away slowly from the curb, and then we were close behind him.
He only drove three more blocks when he pulled over to the curb again, and this time the boy got back out and ran down the street into the darkness.
“The son of a bitch made us again,” Tommy muttered.
“His luck has to change.”
“And so does ours,” Natalie said, from the back seat of the Taurus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
We’re edging our way toward spring, and the talk of war in Iraq, part two, is still prominent in the news. Marty Van Dyke has become ferocious in his newspaper articles, ferocious toward the Russian Mafia. The Russians’ lawyers continually threaten the Herald and Marty for slander and defamation of character, but the newspaper has its lawyers too, and the Russians probably don’t want a battle in the courtroom, not with the Anderson Building hanging over their heads.
Carlo tells me that the Russians are also becoming very sensitive about being watched by their Sicilian counterparts-in-crime. They are aware that Ciccio’s guys are eyeballing their every move, and they have become angered at the slow-down in their ‘businesses’ throughout the city because of Van Dyke’s newspaper attacks and because of the watchfulness of the CPD and the Outfit. They feel ganged up on, their lawyers whine to anyone who will listen.
*
It is false spring. It’s late February, and the scent in the air reminds me of April or May, and the temperature might hit 60 today. But nature will strike back with a late snowstorm or something of the like. It’s Chicago—you don’t like the weather; wait a minute.
We’ve been after Grodnov and company for some time now. Kelvin, the new Special Agent in Charge in Chicago, has begun a new era of relationship with the Chicago Police Department, and he’s been sharing information on the man we like for the Anderson explosion. But the information isn’t sufficient for any prosecutor in Cook County, so we keep reaching out after Grodnov and Rustov without success.
All of this anxiety about catching Grodnov leads me to imagine other scenarios for the murderer of one thousand human beings. What if we’re not catching him because he’s not the man behind the killings? What if the killer simply employed Grodnov? All that seems extremely unlikely to me, but I keep coming back to Walker S. Hansen. Hansen has become a forgotten man in the past few months because of our preoccupation with snaring Grodnov. I’m thinking perhaps Tommy Spencer and my wife were correct. I went after Hansen simply because he’s such an unpleasant man, and so I let my emotions overshadow my reason. I couldn’t stay detached about Walker S., and a cop has to stay non-personal about a potential suspect. Once you start letting your personal feelings intrude…
We’re so certain that it’s Alexei, that I’m having second thoughts. The trouble is we know he picked up the barrel of fertilizer in Mokena, and we know he did the blast at the Picasso sculpture and that he therefore committed the atrocities against the Grant family. So how can he not be our guy?
The frustration sets in so strongly that I drag Tommy downtown to do some research on Walker S. Hansen and his personal empire.
At Records and Deeds we find his papers and holdings. We find out that his construction company is worth somewhere in the vicinity of a half billion dollars. That’s what the Recorder, Paul Finley, tells us.
Paul has been a friend of mine since I became a Homicide. I’ve used him as a resource frequently on the job, but we are close friends too. He was next in line only to Doc Gibron as a close relationship. I don’t have many friends—Tommy is one of the few and the newest. I’ve known Paul a long time.
“This guy is a major player. Beaucoup bucks, big time connections. He’s got a pocket full of politicians in this town. His muscle reaches all the way to Washington D.C. Some say he has the ear of the President, Jimmy.”
“He ever had the odor of mob affiliation?” Tommy asks.
Natalie sits in the overstuffed leather chair. She is getting rather big, by now, and her days before maternity leave are dwindling.
“No. Not even a whiff,” Paul says.
Finley shaves his head. He would have been bald on top anyway, he explained to me, so he thought he’d make it unanimous and shave it all off. He’s a short man, perhaps five seven. A little pudgy too. But he’s got one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen for a wife. She’s a lawyer who works for the mayor on special projects.
“This guy must have vices,” I say. “We know he likes cocaine.”<
br />
“I heard his wife did too,” Paul nods.
“Did you ever meet her?” I ask.
“Believe this? She tried to hit on me. Chubby little me, Jimmy. I don’t think she was serious, but Walker S. was there at a Democratic fund raiser with her. My wife was standing next to me when she begins this very obvious flirtation. I thought my Mary was going to deck her, but Walker S. dragged her off first. They had a big, noisy fight, and then they left.”
“She big on hitting on other men besides you?” Tommy asked.
“That’s what I heard, but I was only in their presence the one time.”
“We were told that the two of them were unusually competitive,” I tell Paul.
“I can see that, but like I said, I only saw the two of them together that one time.”
“Can you see Walker S. Hansen getting his hands dirty with the Russians?” I asked the Recorder.
“I’m not a cop, Jimmy. Jesus, what a question.”
“Can you see his vast empire allowing the barbarians inside the gate?” Tommy asked.
Paul thought a moment and then looked outside onto Michigan Avenue.
“Anybody with that kind of money has to be dirty somewhere in his life.”
*
“You’re back on Hansen,” Tommy says as we scarf yet another half dozen cheesesliders at White Castle well after the witching hour. The temperature has indeed dropped back into the thirties, and the hint of spring has vanished.
Natalie is still with us, although I’ve tried to convince her to cut back to half shifts so she can get off her feet.
The three of us sit at the bar at the fast food burger place. There are perhaps a half dozen other patrons present, at the moment.
“Not really,” I say. But it doesn’t convince me, either.
“We know Grodnov pulled the trigger,” Natalie protests. “We know he got the fertilizer to the Anderson Building. And if Carlton hadn’t had that three foot pipe stuck out the back of his head, he would’ve concurred.”
Tommy chuckles.
“What?” Natalie smiles, her freckled redhead’s face turning pink.
“You talk like one of the guys when you’re with us.”
