by David Duffy
“I’m not sticking up for Mulholland,” I said. “Especially since he’s married to my ex-wife.”
He was raising the pizza to his mouth. It stopped in midair. He stood for a minute, mouth open. “You shitting me?!” Sometimes I can surprise even him.
“Wish I was. She’s the one calling herself Felicity, or Felix, these days. Her daughter’s been kidnapped. He wants our help, but he hasn’t told her. And I’m betting he doesn’t know anything about her past.”
I held out the photo. He finished off the slice and took it. Behind the thick lenses, the eyes worked over the picture like a scanner as the brain put the power of multiple workstations through the paces of considering and rejecting a series of scenarios—all the ones I’d thought of and only he knew how many myriad more.
Eventually he said, “Could be real. Could be she’s into some kinky scene and needs dough.”
“She may have a drug problem.”
“That could explain it, too.” He dropped his bulk into a chair. “How do you and the ex get on?”
“Haven’t seen her in twenty years. We got married young—for all the wrong reasons. She was what you’d call high maintenance. I thought I could conquer that, and I needed a wife to get a foreign posting. The KGB didn’t send single men abroad for fear they’d fall into the clutches of some capitalist vixen.”
“Good thinking.”
“We made it eight years. One son—Aleksei, I’ve mentioned him once or twice.”
He nodded. “The kid you haven’t seen since he was two.”
“That’s right. When the breakup came, it was characterized by betrayal, violence, and retribution—all on her part. On the other hand, she felt I’d deceived her for as long as I’d known her, and she wasn’t wrong about that, although there were extenuating circumstances. You want details?”
He shook his head. “Not unless they’re relevant.”
“Only to us. So imagine my surprise when Bernie asks me to meet with his client Mulholland who’s got a kidnap problem and she waltzes down the stairs.”
He nodded with understanding. “Kinda broke your flow.”
“One way of putting it. Mulholland’s her third husband, so far as I know.”
He considered that for a moment. I’d given him the name of the second in my phone message. Even geniuses get tripped up by the conventions of Russian naming, the feminization of Barsukov, for example, to Barsukova.
“Dame got a commitment problem or just lousy taste?” he asked.
“Maybe both—man in the middle’s Lachko Barsukov.”
“The mobster?”
“One and the same.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“That’s why I let you hang out—entertainment value. You can’t make this stuff up.”
“Me and Pig Pen.”
“I doubt that’s the way Pig Pen sees it. Mulholland really get busted?”
“Uh-huh. I was there. I got the impression from Bernie the Feds have had him in their sights for a while.”
“Goddamned government moves with the speed of cold molasses. They should’ve nailed that bastard years ago. Still, I may volunteer my services—they can use the Basilisk for free. Make sure they get him this time.”
“Don’t be rash. We get six hundred sixty-six K, if we find the girl—and he’s around to write the check.”
“Huh. What price getting even? There’s an ethical dilemma that bears consideration. You definitely going ahead with this thing?”
I shrugged in ambivalence I didn’t necessarily feel. I knew where I was leaning. “I wouldn’t mind clipping Mulholland for that six sixty-six.”
“Uh-huh. You and I both know the probability gods didn’t put Mulholland, your ex-wife, and Lachko Barsukov in your path for their own amusement.”
“That’s the problem with you mathematicians. No room for luck—good or bad.”
“You gonna operate on luck, let’s get a deck of cards. You’ll need Mulholland’s fee to cover your losses.”
I laughed. He grinned a lopsided grin. “Look,” he said, “any competent bookmaker would give two-to-one odds that photo’s faked and the kidnapping thing’s bull. He wouldn’t even want to calculate the chances of your ex-wife showing up married to your new client after … how many years has it been?”
“A lot bigger number than the odds. But you’re not figuring in the intangibles.”
“Pain and death are pretty damned tangible.”
“I’m talking about curiosity—mine.”
“Do I remember something about a dead cat?”
“We both know there’s another shoe that’s going to drop. Maybe I want to see what it is.”
“You ask me, it’s gonna be a steel-toed boot swinging toward your face.”
“I’ll remember to duck.”
He shrugged. “They’re your teeth.”
He pushed himself to his feet and headed off to his office. A minute later, I could hear him banging away on his keyboard. He types with the same subtle touch that characterizes the rest of his approach to life.
I was about to call Bernie to see if I still had a client when the phone rang and a young male voice announced itself as Malcolm Watkins from Hayes & Franklin. The kidnappers wanted their money—tonight.
* * *
Decision time now for real.
Mulholland apparently considered me still in his employ. Polina would have tried to get me fired, but her husband’s prison problems doubtless complicated her efforts, and maybe she hadn’t tried too hard. With all the trouble she’d gone to to cover her tracks—not just one but two new identities (maybe more, for all I knew)—the last thing she wanted was exposure. She’d have to give Bernie a convincing reason to overrule his client. While she probably trusted him as much as anyone, she didn’t trust anyone very far. She definitely wouldn’t have told him the truth.
Her surprise this morning had seemed genuine. She still despised me, she’d made that clear, but her anger also covered fear, fear that she’d been recognized, fear that someone now knew who she’d become. I was a threat, but the far bigger threat was Lachko, who was almost certainly unaware that his ex-wife and daughter were living in the same city he was. That explained her marriage to Mulholland (I’d already eliminated love as a reason, however unfairly) and her low profile since. Polina had always sought protection. As a child, she’d witnessed her father, a general in the GRU, cashiered out of the army, tried for treason, and sent to the Gulag. Her family and her life had disintegrated around her, and she carried a constant terror that it would happen again. It did, with me, one root of her hatred. She sought refuge in Lachko. Kosokov, too. But Kosokov ended up dead in 1999, according to Ivanov. For whatever reason, she hadn’t gone back to Lachko, she’d run, come here. She’d brought Eva with her and become Felicity Kendall. But what about Aleksei? Had she left him behind in Russia? Or …
I didn’t want to think about or.
Polina was resourceful. She’d had enough money and know-how to acquire a new identity. She knew her way around New York. She’d lived here twice before, with me. Even so, alone, in a foreign city, with Eva to worry about, she wouldn’t have felt safe. Especially if she thought Lachko was looking for her. So she’d married Mulholland and his money and settled down. Then—bang! bang! bang!—her cover’s blown, her husband’s jailed, and his fortune’s shrinking faster than an ice cube on the sidewalk outside. Unless I badly missed my guess, she’d be petrified. If this was a setup, it seemed doubtful she was part of it, unless someone was setting both of us up, together. That someone could be Lachko, but I still had the same questions—why and why now and what for?
Lachko hated me, of course. He’d played his part in the Disintegration. He’d destroyed my marriage and my career, and he’d walked off with the prize he coveted in Polina. If he’d wanted me dead, it wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange. At the time, back in Moscow, I’d waited for the late-night knock at the door presaging the trip to the cells
of Lubyanka, but it never came. I’d often wondered if Lachko had tried but his father had vetoed the plan. As time passed, I more or less ceased worrying, although the alarm bells jangled in my head when I learned Lachko had moved to New York. He hadn’t looked me up, and I stayed away from Brighton Beach, where he lived. He might not even know I lived in the same city—he had bigger fish to fry these days.
Lachko ran Russian organized crime in New York. In the post-Soviet chaos, he and his twin brother, Vasily, used their positions to build a highly successful criminal organization in Moscow whose core businesses were protection and extortion, but which had expanded into all manner of related rackets—drugs, smuggling, money laundering, prostitution, contract killing, and more recently cyber-crime. A few years before, they’d gone international, and Lachko moved here to oversee the U.S. interests of the Badger brothers—Barsukov translates to Badger. I followed their progress from a safe distance via Ibansk.com. After the Cheka, the Badgers are Ivanov’s favorite subject, probably because it’s impossible to separate the two. As I’d told Mulholland, the line between criminals and those charged with catching them was never clear in Soviet times. In the New Russia, it disappeared entirely.
Try as I might, I couldn’t see why Lachko would bother with me, or even with Polina, for that matter, after all this time. The flaw in that logic was, I was assuming he had matured into a rational human being since I saw him last, when there was no reason to believe he wasn’t the same brutal, vindictive, destructive bastard I knew him to be—from painful firsthand experience.
The card player in me said I couldn’t yet see enough of the cards on the rest of the table to fold my hand. The Chekist in me said, if this was Lachko at work, I could walk away but he’d follow. Better to play on, eyes open. Besides, having put socialism solidly in my past, there was still that six sixty-six, plus expenses.
I should have been mindful of another Russian proverb. The only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
CHAPTER 6
Hayes & Franklin rents twelve floors of One New York Plaza, a big, ugly, waffle-walled tower at the southeast tip of Manhattan, five minutes’ walk from my office. Almost six o’clock, but the thermometer was still into the nineties, the air as solid as concrete. I could feel the heat of the sidewalk through my shoes.
The building’s modern, but Hayes & Franklin’s offices are decorated right out of the Thomas Chippendale catalog, if Thomas Chippendale had a catalog, which maybe he did. Lots of reproduction mahogany furniture, nautical pictures, and prints of birds and botanicals. Bernie occupied a corner office overlooking the South Ferry Terminal. Documents were stacked on every available surface, including the floor. I took two piles off the chair across from his desk and sat down. He didn’t look up, just muttered, “Fuck it,” to something he was reading, pencil in hand. He put a blunt black line across the page.
Despite his harried appearance, Bernie’s a cool customer. Almost never raises his voice. I’d been surprised by his swearing this morning, and it didn’t appear his temperament had improved. Mulholland and FTB had him under a lot of strain. Maybe other clients, too. Or he’d spent too much of the day with Polina. I didn’t want to make a bad day worse, but there was no way around it.
“How’s Mulholland?” I asked.
He raised one eye. “They’re keeping him overnight. Arraignment and bail in the morning. Totally fucking unnecessary. He could’ve been out this afternoon. Except that the goddamned U.S. attorney feels she has to make a show of how tough she can be on white-collar defendants because she spent most of her career defending them. It’s all bullshit, starting with the charges. Bullshit politics, bullshit playing to the media, more bullshit. Meanwhile Rory’s still in the Tombs—for no good goddamned reason. She’s busting my balls over bail, too. To think I got that woman made partner. No good deed goes unpunished.”
His voice had risen through most of his rant, almost to a yell, then softened again at the end until he sounded remorseful. He was having a worse day than I thought. I hesitated to ask a question, for fear of setting him off again, but I wasn’t clear I was following.
“What woman?” I said.
He looked at me like I’d just stepped off the boat from some country permanently mired in the Middle Ages. “This is a federal case, you Cossack. That means it’s run by the Justice Department and the Justice Department’s designated representative in this judicial district, so we’re talking about the U.S. fucking attorney for the Southern District of New York!”
“And she was your partner?”
“Before she ascended to her current lofty heights of public service, yes, she toiled here in the fields of Hayes & Franklin, where, thanks in part to me, she became a very well paid partner. Bitch.”
“Sorry I asked. Let’s drop it.”
He pushed his chair back from the desk, put down the pencil, and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.
“Sorry, Turbo. Been a long day, so far. I need to vent, I guess—but I do feel like I’ve got a knife in my back. Victoria was a partner here before she got her current appointment. She came to us in a merger, a firm in Atlanta. She put in to move to New York. I took her under my wing since I came in as an outsider, too. She’s a white-collar crime specialist, like I said. She worked her ass off, developed quite a reputation. When she came up for partner, I shoved it through. No question she deserved it, but it was still a fight with the old stiffs who think they run this place. Woman, Dixie accent, criminal law—not the Hayes & Franklin mold. She got the U.S. attorney post six months ago. Big-time appointment. Now the bitch wants two mil bail. No good deed…”
“That was her on the phone this morning, at Mulholland’s apartment?”
“Courtesy call. Some frigging courtesy. We had an understanding. She’s been looking into FTB for months. Predatory lending makes good press. Sorry, that’s unfair. Not at all clear she could’ve made a case, but between you, me, and the microphone in the wall, some of FTB’s practices were close to the line. Anyway, when the credit crunch hit, we talked, and I thought we agreed, absent compelling evidence, she’d leave Rory alone so he could focus on saving the bank. There are jobs at stake, among other things.”
“Maybe she found the compelling evidence.”
“Rory says there’s nothing to find. Our own investigation—Hayes & Franklin, I mean—backs him up.”
“Not the first time a client’s lied to his lawyer.”
“Thanks, Turbo. I can always count on you to cheer me up.”
“What about the money laundering?”
“This morning’s the first time I heard anything about that. We’re looking into it.”
“Surprised Felix Mulholland, too.”
He pulled his chair back to the desk and leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
“I was watching. Something about that spooked her.”
“You sure?”
“The first job of a good spy…”
“Don’t give me the assess-human-nature speech. I’ve heard it as many times as the Russians winning World War II. So what’s the deal between the two of you?”
“What’d she tell you?”
“She’s a client, Turbo. What she tells me is between us.”
“Be careful how much stock you put in your clients, Bernie. Felix Mulholland was no more born Felicity Kendall in Jackson Heights, Queens, than I was born Richard Nixon in Yorba Linda, California. She’s a client with a past. Colorful is one adjective. I’m sure the Post will find others.”
That got him out of the chair, half standing, leaning forward. “The Post? What the hell are you talking about?”
Since I arrived, Bernie had been talking at me, sometimes to me. He was preoccupied with other problems, I understood that, but I wanted his full attention for the next few minutes—partly for his own good and partly because I needed him to appreciate I was coming clean. However this thing played later tonight, Bernie had to believe my judgment was unclouded by emotional connections rooted in ancient history. The thr
eat of more unwanted media coverage—from an always unwanted source—did the trick. I chose my words carefully.
“I take it Mulholland didn’t have you guys check her out before he popped the question?”
“No! Of course not. Why…”
Bernie sat down and pushed back from the desk again, putting distance between himself and whatever he feared I was about to say. The look on his face was the one of a well-dressed pedestrian as he jumps back from the curb, knowing he’s too late to avoid the muddy splash from the taxi accelerating through a great big puddle.
“Prenup?” I asked.
“None of your damned business,” he growled.
Careful. Bernie took confidentiality seriously. Appearing to pry wasn’t going to help. “True enough. You know she was married before?”
“No. Why is that relevant in this day and age?”
“Mulholland’s her third, at least.”
“So?”
“Second’s named Barsukov.”
The chair slid forward in a flash and Bernie leaned into my face. “Lachko Barsukov?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus Christ. How do you know this?” He was fully in my face now.
“I’m the first.”
