A bit irrationally, and only within my own thoughts, I asked myself where Marusia had been a few hours ago, when I really needed her? Had she in fact known what Sascha was doing and been too frightened to intervene? Was she more afraid of a sexual predator—and genuine psycho—like Sascha than she was of a more ‘proper’ gangster like Oleg? I could only guess about her motivations, yet I was in no position to quibble. She quite likely saved me from a terrible beating. And I was heartily grateful.
That night, I cuddled up to Danny until the morning came, keeping my secret buried inside me. Thank God he didn’t know. And thank God we were together. We would face another day together. Right now, that was good enough.
‘HELP THESE PEOPLE’
It was now Saturday afternoon on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Hours before, Ian had dutifully followed Ingrisano’s suggestion and called the Australian Embassy in Moscow. He reported the story to an embassy secretary, received a noncommittal response, and hung up believing he had wasted his time. His nerves were already fraying, his fears growing.
Was anything really happening that would keep Yvonne and Danny alive? The FBI guys were helpful, sincerely concerned, but they were woefully helpless when it came to making something happen in Russia. Was he really going to have to raise $1.6 million to get them out? Goddamn that Miasnikov. He’d have to answer for this.
The Raymans had travel plans for the weekend: a visit to Wendy’s mother in Philadelphia. They would stay at a hotel on Saturday night and return on Sunday, leaving the kids with their housekeeper. At least it would give them a chance for their heads to clear and be fresh for the Monday phone call.
When they checked in to the hotel after the three-hour drive, Ian called home for any messages. The housekeeper read them off. One was from Jerry Shestak. Holy Christ, Ian thought, I forgot all about him. He called Shestak, who asked if anything was happening with regard to the Weinstocks. Ian told him of the helpful but limited involvement of the FBI and of the tepid response from the Australians.
‘Damn it,’ Jerry bellowed. ‘Useless! They’re all useless!’ He then repeated what he had said the day before, about the young apprentice Russian lawyer in his office, Dimitry Afanasiev.
‘Call him, right now,’ he instructed, giving Ian the phone number for the lawyer’s home in Philadelphia. ‘I spoke to him about it. He may be your only shot.’
What did he have to lose? Ian thought. He dialed the number. When Afanasiev answered, he eschewed pleasantries to get right to the heart of the matter. With an understated brashness and a swaggering air of confidence, he spoke with an unhurried sense of calm, but his words bit the air hard.
‘I believe I can help you,’ he said, ‘but I need to know the whole story. Tell me everything.’
At just twenty-three, Dimitry O. Afanasiev had come a long way. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, round-faced, and cherubic-shaped, he looked like a naïf, yet he was sharp in intellect and burning with ambition. Fluent in Russian and English, he had earned an undergraduate law degree from the University of Leningrad in 1989, and then worked for a time in the Leningrad prosecutor’s office. A born lawyer, and self-promoter, he vaulted past other fledgling young law students to get into the foreign-study program, landing scholarships to the prestigious law schools, first the University of Pittsburgh, then the University of Pennsylvania.
Not content merely filling up space in lecture halls, he got real-world experience doing an apprenticeship with major law firms in Philadelphia, beginning at Harrison, Segal & Lewis before Jerry Shestak recruited him in 1991. By year’s end, even though he was still in law school at Penn, he was promoted to an associate at Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen.
Afanasiev was valuable to Shestak for the contacts he had made as a novice prosecutor back home. He could call upon not only influential Russian attorneys but also people he’d had to work with while putting cases together before the fall of Communism—both low- and high-level KGB apparatchiks. Though the agency—or at least that dreaded three-letter insignia for it—was now past-tense, some of those people were still around in the new Agency for Federal Security and its many affiliated tentacles. Others, having leeched onto Russian businesses, were no less valuable to Shestak’s American corporate clients.
After speaking with Ian, Shestak had a very different kind of assignment for Dimitry—and a pro bono one at that—to put his contacts to use saving the lives of two people back in his native country. Relating the Weinstocks’ plight, he barked at the startled young man, ‘Help these people!’
Typically unflappable, Dimitry accepted the task with little outward emotion. Well, he thought to himself, it’s more exciting than the corporate law stuff I am working on.
Shestak, who could read the laconic Russian better than anyone, knew that for Dimitry this was all but a formal declaration of war. The kid was ready to go into full battle mode on behalf of the Weinstocks.
This was something Ian discovered as soon as he spoke with Dimitry. Like a prosecutor, Dimitry wouldn’t quit pumping him for information until every detail was covered to his satisfaction. For two hours, the grilling went on. Finally, his yellow legal pad streaked with notes, he made a vow to Ian.
‘I will personally work with you until this case is solved, and I will do this as quickly as possible,’ he said. ‘It is now 11:30pm in Moscow, so I will start immediately. There are people I can contact who I can trust. We will have to investigate the business and this Miasnikov fellow. We will have to set up direct contacts. I will keep you posted.’
The next sound was a click. Ian, burned out by the interrogation, slumped back on the hotel room bed and stretched his limbs. Lord, he thought, that kid is like a human buzzsaw. But is he for real? Could he actually get something done, or was it all hot air? Would he even hear from him again?
For Dimitry, it was indeed a personal challenge. Not that he regarded the FBI as useless, but he firmly believed the fate of Yvonne and Danny Weinstock rested squarely on his shoulders. Dimitry knew something was needed that reached beyond the ways, means, and inclinations of the FBI and the governments of Australia and America. Dr Rayman was quite disturbed about it. He complained that the Australian Federal police and the FBI were not taking his concerns for his relatives in Russia seriously. They had almost laughed at him when he said that the reason he thought his relatives were taken hostage was because Daniel Weinstock had inquired about the health of relatives who were known to have died a long time before. Although Dr Rayman thought he was being sent a message that the conversation was controlled, he felt nobody took him seriously or showed any desire to help.
He came to the law firm, as a last resort, in the hope that Wolf Block’s involvement would get the US government moving. Jerry Shestak and Dimitry had a Russian capability that could be helpful. To be honest, as Dimitry recalled, it was only when the FBI learned that a powerful law firm had become involved that they decided they had better become more involved in the case. However, Dimitry could not wait for them to move. He had to do something. Right after he spoke with Dr Rayman, he laid out his Russian address and phone books in front of him and made a strong pot of coffee. He knew it would be a long night.
14
DAY SEVEN:
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12th
THE DACHA, PHILADELPHIA, AND MOSCOW
After the convulsions of the previous day, Sunday was mercifully uneventful. Not that Oleg and his snarling mother weren’t still seething at me for having stood up to her about the window-washing matter, but it seemed that on Sundays everything in the house shut down in a mass slumber. I did, too. Starved, exhausted, and violated, my body just succumbed to a tide of sleep at around 2am, not to awaken until around noon. Those were ten hours of blessed escape. I only wish it had been longer.
In the early afternoon, Oleg’s wife, Rae, came to the dacha with a woman she identified as her mother, another white-haired, big-boned Russian woman, as well as a young woman with square glasses whose name was Natasha. She was the nanny
for Piotr and the baby, Sascha, and as such was a rare luxury in Russia. But then Oleg, for a low-life punk, evidently enjoyed the perks of life as a Mob boss. Evidently, he had several homes in and around Moscow, and most likely came to the dacha either to visit the babushka or when he needed a place to stash people like Danny and me when the situation arose.
The latter notion gave me chills. Considering the memory seared into my mind of the babushka diligently hanging up that noose, I wondered how many other victims had been trapped within the walls here, and for how many those walls had been the last thing they ever saw.
All that afternoon, the men and women kept their distance from each other. They kept to separate orbits, the women and kids downstairs chattering like hens, the men upstairs in the lounge huddled around the television smoking cigarettes, coughing, spitting, and arguing about who knows what. Since the men were too lazy to get up and keep an eye on us in the bedroom, we were invited into the lounge to watch with them. At first, it was harmless enough. Clicking the remote endlessly—apparently a trait common to men no matter where in the world—images flashed across the screen of various aspects of Russian life. At one point, though, a tennis match came on, ironically, from Australia.
Of course, this evoked a great deal of homesickness, making me think about our kids back home—and also underscoring the fact that Danny’s youngest son, Jonathan, happened to be staying with Ian and Wendy. We were sure the Raymans had taken pains to shield all the kids from the phone calls going on between Russia and Wayne. We had in fact assumed that Ian and Wendy had been told by whomever they were working with not to let word out to anyone that we were in trouble, not even to our housekeeper, Susan, back in Brighton. If so, such a blackout on our whereabouts and our situation may have seemed cruel to our families, but it was absolutely essential to any hope that we might be rescued. We could only imagine what would befall us if word leaked out to the Australian media of our kidnapping. Grigory Miasnikov was no doubt communicating regularly with the people in the Melbourne office; any hint that the authorities were working on our case would surely have meant the gang had no shot at collecting any money. And that would mean our usefulness, and any reason to be kept alive, was over. The next step at that point would be to dump our bodies somewhere in the Russian wilderness.
After six days, I could sense that the gang was getting quite impatient and was just itching for our blood. In fact, we probably had been brought into the television room not for our pleasure but expressly to be made aware of how bloodthirsty they were. Not by coincidence, I’m sure, after watching those non-threatening programs, they began to sort through a pile of video tapes, all of them movies with a similar theme: gory content.
The first one they put into the VCR was The Krays, a blood-soaked British film about true-life twin brothers who ran the London Mob in the ’60s. After keeping their eyes glued to every brutal moment, they put on Havana, starring Robert Redford, who plays a gambler in pre-Castro Cuba and gets caught up with barbaric revolutionaries. For me, it was more amusing than grisly watching the Russian versions of these movies, in which a single, monotonous Russian voice dubbed all the parts, male and female. But for us, the real moral of the stories was clearly meant to be that we would meet the same fate as the celluloid victims. Danny and I had our own name for these movies. We called them ‘Mafia training films.’ It was wry, but true.
For this small-time Mob, some of whom we were certain would turn tail and run rather than stand and fight at the first sign of real danger, these were no less than training sessions. Even their language and facial expressions would rub off from the last movie they had seen. Some Mob, we thought. Sometimes they were more suited to a Monty Python movie than The Godfather. And yet, as inept as they could seem, these same bumblers carried very serious weapons, and they had our lives in their hands. The question was whether that was good or bad for us.
Curiously, Oleg did not watch movies with the others. Perhaps he thought he needed no further instructions in the mobster lifestyle and, as the boss, would not deign to be in the same room when such indoctrination was going on. Or maybe he was more into light comedies. When he wanted the tube for himself, however, it was his. Halfway through Havana, he came into the room, stopped the tape, and turned on a channel that featured a gypsy variety show, which was a kind of torture in itself to see. Gladly, for us, we were ordered out of the room. Back in the bedroom, I took my usual position, on my knees in front of the window, gazing at the snowcapped streets below. That was my entertainment for the rest of the afternoon, and my whimsies about somehow being free of this place and these people were more enjoyable than all the gypsy folk dancing from Moscow to Minsk.
That night, Danny and I again hashed out what we might tell Ian the next day when we would return to the grave business of buying ourselves more time to stay alive. We felt we had done ourselves some good by dropping the clue about Uncle Chaim and Auntie Tova the last time, though we had no inkling about what, if anything, was being done on our behalf all the way around the world. We did know Ian had picked up on it. Now, we figured we had to get through to him that we were indeed in mortal and immediate danger, and that this was no business debt but rather a common kidnapping and ransom.
To do that, we needed to drop another clue—and maybe gain some luck that we couldn’t foresee. We tried out various lines, but they were too subtle or too obvious, too easy for Robert to see what we were trying to do. We were beginning to get frustrated. We knew we might have only one shot to drop a good clue before the door would slam shut.
Then it came to me. I recalled what my initial reflex reaction was when we’d been taken hostage just outside of Sheremetyevo Airport, when, forced into the back of that baleful Zil, guns pointed at my belly, I had instinctively grabbed my stomach and said, ‘Baby. Baby.’ While it had not spared me from being beaten, and even kicked in my stomach, I was not completely sure the gang didn’t believe I was in fact pregnant. I could use that cover now.
It was a fail-safe line to use with Ian, for two reasons. As a pediatrician, it was a natural subject to broach with him. What’s more, he would know I was lying. He knew that after I had nearly died giving birth to Melanie, my doctor had warned me not to become pregnant again, and that I underwent a tubal ligation—a procedure commonly known as having the fallopian tubes tied. Thus, if I could make references about being pregnant to Ian, who of course knew otherwise, he would pick up on the lie, hopefully without flinching or saying anything to the contrary. Certainly the rest of the gang, who had heard it before, wouldn’t even blink. Or so I hoped.
But was I being too cute, too slick? Was I pushing my luck?
Time would tell. If I could speak to Ian, I would run with it. I decided not to tell Danny of the idea. I didn’t want it to come off as too contrived, too planned. I thought it would be more spontaneous if he heard me say it at the same moment everyone else did. I debated with myself all that night about whether I was right or wrong to make that decision on my own, and whether to do it at all. Unlike the night before, I didn’t sleep a wink.
There was no more time left to lose myself in dreams.
DIMITRY AND THE COLONEL
Nine hours behind, Dimitry Afanasiev wouldn’t sleep that day or for another night, either. Sitting at a desk in his small Philadelphia apartment, draining cups of black coffee, he kept the phone at his ear for hours. Having committed himself to the unlikely transcontinental rescue mission of two people he didn’t even know, he talked his way through a chain of Russian intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, having been away from Moscow for two years—a critical span given that it coincided with the first shaky steps of post-Communist reformation—he had to chart a whole new road map. To be sure, things were a lot less complicated when the KGB ruled all facets of the intelligence and security. In the year since the KGB was decertified, the agency wasn’t restructured as much as it was subdivided under the aegis of two interrelated umbrella agencies, the Mini
stry of Security, or MBR (the spies), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD (the cops). Carved even further into a maze of sub-agencies, people who did basically the same thing could belong to a half-dozen different agencies, or ‘directorates,’ and report to twenty different superiors. Of the 400,000 working at the KGB in its last year, only 137,000 now remained at the MBR; it would atrophy to 80,000 within two more years.
By contrast, the MVD benefited from the end of the Cold War and the subsequent explosion of crime throughout the country. It housed the police, militia, and special troops, whose ranks swelled to 540,000. But they were poorly paid and trained, and easy marks for corruption. With better-paying jobs on the outside, in business or organised crime, agents had begun to stream out the doors. Others remained on the job—and on the take. As it was, no one could really be sure who was friend and who was foe.
This was the minefield Dimitry had to navigate in finding someone clean enough to be able to lead and coordinate a genuine rescue strategy, who wouldn’t double-deal with the Weinstocks’ lives. Adding to the difficulties, it was the weekend so offices in Moscow were mostly empty. He had to wheedle home numbers for people, many of whom weren’t there either, having gone off to their own country dachas.
Rather than work up from the bottom of the spy barrel, he began by going first to the most highly placed government officials he had dealt with while in the prosecutor’s office in Leningrad: Foreign Minister Andre Kozyrev and Boris Puginsky, the deputy chief justice of Russia. From both men, he elicited permission to use them as references in order to pierce the veil of proprietary information at the intelligence bureaus, where people didn’t know him and would otherwise brush him off. It worked. Liberally dropping the names of Kozyrev and Puginsky, his search for a saviour unearthed some receptive ears but also more than a few dead ends.
Eleven Days of Hell Page 17
