by Greg Dinallo
“You go there to get rid of a vice, Nikolai!” Vera screeches, yanking the curtain to close off the alcove. “Not to pick one up!”
“Hey, people who live in glass dachas . . .”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Come on, Vera. I saw you! He finally make chief? That it?”
“Chief? You can’t mean Shevchenko?!” Vera’s about to launch a fusillade of indignant denials when someone knocks on the door. Several sharp, authoritative raps.
Vera opens it brusquely, revealing a tall, good-looking woman in a down-filled overcoat, standing in the corridor. Vera’s eyes narrow and burn with anger—"Another woman?!” written all over them. “It’s over, Nikolai! I mean over!” She takes a folded newspaper from under her arm and throws it at me. It whizzes past my head and hits the wall above the dresser. Vera turns on a heel and blows out of the apartment. “Take a number, honey,” she says to the woman standing in the doorway.
“Vera?! Vera, wait!” I’m stumbling down the corridor after her when it suddenly strikes me that I’m stark naked. I put on the brakes and slink back to my apartment, palms cupped over my shortcomings.
The woman greets me with an amused smile. She is tall and zaftig, as my father used to say, with large features that seem familiar. “Nikolai?” she echoes with uncertainty, flinching as the door in the foyer slams, rattling the glass. “Nikolai Katkov?”
I nod numbly, trying to place her, and slip into the apartment in search of my pants.
She gives me a moment to find them, then follows. “Gabriella Scotto, Special Agent, United States Treasury Department,” she announces in heavily accented Russian, displaying her identification.
“We got rid of the KGB. Now we have Americans with badges knocking on our doors.”
“I don’t believe they knocked.”
“They didn’t ask permission to come in, either.”
“Could we talk for a few minutes?”
“If you insist,” I reply in English. “But I’d rather we massacre your language than mine.”
“Fair enough,” she replies, sounding a lot like a tourist I met from a place called Queens. “My agency is interested in a story you wrote. They think it might tie in with something they’re working on.”
“Really?” I wonder, unable to imagine what the U.S. Treasury and black-market medals dealers could possibly have in common. “You came all the way from Washington to talk to me?”
“Of course not. Please don’t feel flattered. I happened to be here giving a seminar, and my people asked me to—”
“Militia Headquarters,” I interrupt, finally placing her. “The data-sharing expert.”
“That’s me.”
“I knew you looked familiar. You’re wasting your time, by the way. The only thing a Russian cop values more than his gun in his fiefdom. Sharing just isn’t part of his vocabulary.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she says, breaking into a confused smile. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”
“Collided.”
Her brow furrows as she tries to remember.
“Debunking the Power of the Press . . . ?”
“And Other Myths,” she adds with a scowl. “The journalist with the eating disorder.”
“Hunger for truth.”
“Sorry. Didn’t recognize you without your bib.”
“You’re welcome to borrow it.”
“Oh?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to eat your words.”
“Look, Mr. Katkov, I dragged my butt all the way out here, and—”
“I’ve seen better, Agent Scotto. Believe me.”
“Okay. Okay,” she says, exasperated. “We can spend the next hour insulting each other, or we can spend it doing business. What do you say?”
A loud moan comes from the sleeping alcove before I can reply.
Agent Scotto’s eyes widen with concern and sweep to the curtain. “Who’s that?”
I shrug sheepishly. “I’m afraid we just met.”
“I think I’m starting to understand. That was your girlfriend before?”
“Was,” I reply glumly.
“I’ve been there,” she confides with a hint of empathy. “Played both parts. More than once.”
I’m thinking Special Agent Scotto has a healthy lustiness that makes it easy for me to believe her when Ludmilla T. moans again.
“We better insult each other someplace else,” Scotto suggests. “Trouble is, where? This berg makes my old neighborhood look like a country estate.”
“Where did you grow up? In Queens?”
“Bensonhurst. That’s in Brooklyn. You sound like you grew up in London.”
“Well, frankly I’ve never been out of Russia. Not every Englishman who lives here is a spy, you know. My parents hired a tutor when I was a child. He was from Dover, as I recall. You like country estates?”
“Not particularly.”
“You’ll fancy this one. Give me a few minutes.”
I slip behind the curtain. Ludmilla hasn’t moved. I pull the covers over her, then quickly freshen up and dress. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on my boots when she stirs.
“Hi,” she whispers, sleepy-eyed.
“Hi. You okay?”
She smiles weakly and nods.
“I’ll be out for a while. Place is yours. There’s some coffee in the cupboard.”
“Coffee?” she mouths, brightening.
“Make enough for two.” I blow her a kiss and return to the parlor in search of my parka. Agent Scotto locates it on the floor behind an armchair and tosses it to me. “You don’t work on a word processor?” she wonders as we leave the apartment.
“I wish. Every time I save enough money, I run out of coffee and cigarettes.”
“Among other things,” Scotto sneers, noticing the vodka bottles on the way out.
The air is unusually clear, thanks to a wind shift that took the smog south along with the snow. It left a crystalline patina in its wake, giving Lyublino an uncharacteristic sparkle.
“So, Agent Scotto,” I begin as we walk north on Kurskaya. “What does Moscow’s black market in medals have to do with your Treasury Department?”
“Medals?” she wonders with a puzzled frown. “What’re you talking about?”
“My article. Independent Gazette published a story I wrote on black-market medal dealers.”
“Never seen it. The one they faxed me from D.C. is about a guy named Vorontsov. He was murdered to stop him from blowing the whistle on a privatization scandal.”
My jaw drops. That’s the last thing I expected. “How’d your people acquire it?”
“Picked it off your wire service.”
“ITAR?”
“We call it RITA.”
Either way, it’s an acronym for the Russian Information Telegraph Agency, formerly TASS. “That’s rather puzzling. The story never ran. It was spiked. . . .” The pieces suddenly fall into place. “Sergei.”
“Who’s he?”
“The editor who spiked it. I wanted the story back. He claimed he’d misplaced it. I had a feeling he was up to something. Now I know what.”
“He sent it to the wire service? Why? Why wouldn’t he run the story himself?”
“Because the militia blew it out of the water.”
“And he never told you he sent it to RITA?”
“Not surprising. He’s a rather cautious, secretive fellow. Out of necessity, mind you. We all were. I guess, like most of us, Sergei still hasn’t completely shaken the old ways of doing business. He’s also a friend. Maybe he didn’t want to get my hopes up in case it didn’t fly.”
“It just might. We knew it’d been spiked, but we weren’t sure why. So we weren’t sure who to trust. That’s why we came to you first.”
“Quite smart.”
“I get paid to be smart. Those documents you mentioned in the story, you still have access to them?”
“No, but not for lack of trying.”
“Well maybe I can—”
“You had your chance. You blew it.”
“Pardon me?”
“You recall that day at Militia Headquarters?”
“Oh, no,” she groans, as it dawns on her.
“Oh, yes. They were the bone of contention.”
“Guess I owe you one. This Investigator . . .”
“Shevchenko.”
“He still has them?”
“I doubt it. He said he was returning them to the Interior Ministry.”
“Shit.” Her brow knits with confusion. “I thought he worked for the Interior Ministry.”
“He does, but he’s at thirty-eight Petrovka, not Ministry Headquarters on Markskaya. That’s where the Oversight Committee’s located. The documents belong to them, and I imagine that’s where Shevchenko sent them. Keep in mind, the Interior Ministry’s a massive bureaucracy. It’s got more subdirectorates, departments, and administrative sectors than you can count. The joke used to be that half of Moscow has to work at the IM to keep an eye on the other half.”
A knowing smile cracks Agent Scotto’s face as we turn the corner and come upon the Durasov Estate. Built on a wooded lakefront by a family of aristocrats, the eighteenth-century mansion now houses the Oceanographic Institute. Its spired, snow-dusted dome caps two intersecting wings that form a Greek cross, giving it churchlike scale and presence. “Wow,” Scotto exclaims as we walk down the drive lined with towering poplars. “Now, that’s what I call a weekend retreat.”
“That’s precisely what it was a couple of hundred years ago.”
She stops walking and catches my eye. “You’d have to launder a hell of a lot of money to build it today.”
I nod thoughtfully, reading between the lines. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Money laundering.”
“Interdicting it. That’s FinCEN’s specialty.”
“Who?”
“FinCEN—Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—it’s a federal task force that gathers financial intelligence. We have personnel from Customs, IRS, Secret Service, Postal Inspection, FBI, BATF—”
“I’m afraid you left out KGB,” I say, facetiously.
“We’re working on it. Right now we can access American commercial, financial, and law enforcement data banks; but we’re going global.”
“Information-sharing expertise.”
“And analysis. I’m Deputy Director.”
“A bureaucrat. Russians abhor bureaucrats.”
“So do I. I’m a cop by trade, Katkov, an eighteen-eleven—licensed to carry a weapon.”
“Rhymes with double-o-seven.”
“We had it first,” she says with a sassy smile. “Twenty years in the field. Border patrol. Undercover drug enforcement. I was running a network of informants when they put this operation together and bumped me upstairs.”
“Sounds like you rather miss getting your hands dirty.”
“Any agent pushing a desk who says otherwise is full of it.” She stops walking and sits on a bench overlooking the frozen lake, then emits a reflective sigh. “Trouble is it gets on more than your hands. Anyway, the case I was telling you about: Some funds FinCEN’s been tracking surfaced in a deal to build a pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. The broker on the Russian side was a V. I. Vorontsov.”
“That makes sense. He was an accomplished trade representative. This country is drowning in red ink. I venture to say hard dollars for oil is one of the keys to recovery.”
“Yeah, but the pipeline deal’s being put together with dirty money. If Vorontsov was responsible for oversight and brokering it at the same time, we have a classic case of the fox in the hen house.”
“Maybe. Then again, perhaps he was working both sides of the street.”
“You mean undercover?”
“Precisely. Can you think of a better way of conducting oversight than being at the table when the deal is going down?”
“Several. You have any proof he was murdered to stop him from blowing the whistle?”
“No. But I’m pretty damn sure he was.”
“Why, because it’ll sell more newspapers?”
“No, dammit. Because somebody tried to kill me yesterday.”
That stops Scotto cold. She’s all ears now.
“I thought I knew why, but my story running on RITA changes things. If you lifted it off the wire, maybe other people did too?”
“People threatened by it?”
I nod.
“Okay. Then why did Vorontsov’s obituary say it was robbery?”
“The medals. Some are quite valuable. To make a long story short, he was wearing them the night he was murdered. The police figured someone killed him for them, but now I’d wager that’s not the case.”
“Well, then maybe I should touch base with Shevchenko. See if he learned anything about sharing information.”
“I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. He said these matters are usually handled by Economic Crimes, anyway. Mentioned an investigator named Gudonov.”
“Thanks but no thanks.”
“You know him?”
“Not really. We had a run-in at the seminar. He’s an arrogant jerk.”
“So is every other cop I’ve ever met—”
She glares at me.
“—in Moscow.”
She smiles. “Anything else you can think of?”
“Not really, no.”
“Well, we’re dealing at the highest levels of international finance here. Not the sort of stuff you pick up in the street. But you can reach me at the embassy if anything surfaces.” She stands, takes a deep breath of cold air, and walks to the edge of the lake.
“For what it’s worth, Scotto, your people ever come across the name Barkhin? Arkady Barkhin?”
“Barkhin? No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“The local mob boss. Moscow’s very own vor v zakone. He operates a private club, among other things. All the high-level deal makers who come to town fancy it.”
“You mean businessmen, bankers, government types?” she prompts, in her rapid-fire cadence.
“Yes. It’s called the Paradise.”
“Sounds very mystical.” She breaks into a little smile at something that occurs to her. “That’s mystical as in religious experience, not mythical as in—”
“The Power of the Press and Other Myths,” I interject.
“Very good.”
“Tough language.”
“We’re a tough bunch. What’s the story on the Paradise?”
“Palm trees and parrots, gambling, floor show, best cuisine in town.”
“No kidding?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sounds like my kind of place.”
15
Six! The hard way!” The stickman calls out in English as the dice come to rest. Like most of the staff at the Paradise, he’s a young Cuban.
“Yeah!” Agent Scotto exclaims in a husky growl. She jerks her fist backward in a victory gesture that one of the caged parrots seconds with a piercing squawk.
It’s midafternoon, though it could be two in the morning in the windowless club that’s buzzing with activity. Scotto is having a ball. I’m strung tighter than a balalaika. We’ve been here an hour, and still no sign of Barkhin or his athlete-turned-enforcer types. Not that I’m sorry. The thug who tried to kill me was probably a discarded jock. If the medal dealers didn’t hire him, who did? Barkhin put me onto Rafik; Barkhin sent me to Kafé Graneetsa; Barkhin, and only Barkhin, knew both Rafik and I would be there—but there’s nothing that links him to Vorontsov or a privatization scandal. Furthermore, I know why the medal dealers were pissed off; but Barkhin’s motive, if he has one, escapes me. And why take out both of us? Why—
“What do you think, Katkov?” Scotto asks, pulling me out of it as the stickman rakes the dice toward her. “Let it ride?”
“Let it ride?” I echo forlornly, eyeing the stacks of chips that can be bought only with hard currencies, preferably dollars. In
deed, they’re critical to our economy, and, along with other schemes to acquire them, the government declared gambling for rubles illegal, punishable by imprisonment and/or a stiff fine. “Well, I guess you could. Then again, you could give it to me and make believe you lost it.”
Scotto laughs, then scoops up the dice and begins shaking them to the beat of congas that comes from the dining room where the floor show is starting.
“The player’s point is six,” the stickman shouts as gamblers lean to the table, covering the felt with chips. “Six is the point. No more bets.”
“Come on six,” Scotto urges, blowing on her fist before tossing the dice.
“Six!” the stickman exclaims after several rolls. “Six! Pay the shooter! Pay the line!”
“Katkov? Hey, Katkov?!” Arkady Barkhin’s voice rises over the din as the stickman pushes stack after stack of chips toward Scotto. The crowd parts. Ray-Ban is on point. Arturo the driver brings up the rear. Barkhin shoulders his way toward me, greeting several regulars en route. “Katkov, what the hell are you doing here?” His enthusiasm seems genuine, as if he’s not at all surprised that I’m alive.
“Touring Moscow’s hot spots with a friend,” I reply, making the introductions.
“Gabriella Scotto,” Barkhin repeats musically as he sweeps his eyes over her. “Italiano?”
“Italiana,” she corrects, emphasizing the a. Then in her New York-accented Russian she explains, “On my father’s side. My mother’s family came from Kiev.”
Barkhin’s brows go up. “Really? So did mine,” he offers in a puzzled tone. “No offense, but your accent, it doesn’t sound like . . .”
“Hey, if you grew up in Brooklyn, you’d talk Russian like this too.”
“So,” Barkhin says with a laugh, “how do you two know each other?”
“Gabriella’s a tourist. She—”
“I work for Nikolai’s cousin,” Scotto interrupts as if she’s been saying it all her life. “He insisted I look him up when I got here.”
“Why don’t I have cousins like that? What kind of work?”
“He has a restaurant in Brooklyn. Brighton Beach.”
