Last to Fold

by David Duffy

  I called Bernie as I came out of the tunnel on the Manhattan side. No answer—he’d gone home after all. I left a message that I’d drop off the money later that day. I put the Valdez in its lot and stopped by the office to put the gun, bag, and BlackBerry in the safe.

  The smell of marijuana hung in the air. Foos was asleep in his office-bedroom. It would take a small explosion to wake him. Pig Pen was another matter.

  “Nighttime, Russky,” he said as I passed his door.

  “I know, Pig Pen. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  “Wacky weed.”

  “That’s the boss, right, Pig Pen? Not you?”

  Through the dark I could just make out a half-open eye with a look that said, Don’t be too sure. Great. A stoned parrot.

  “Good night, Pig Pen.”

  “Good night, cheapskate.”

  I took some comfort in the fact that he latches on to his latest word only until someone teaches him a new one.

  I drank a small glass of vodka in the kitchen while I tried to remember why Ratko’s name sounded familiar. I didn’t get very far, and the vodka didn’t help. Maybe sleep would. My watch read 3:37 as I walked home through the empty streets. It was still hot.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Chekist coughed, put his lighter to another cigarette, and clicked PLAY. The decade-old tape, digitally transferred to a laptop, crackled to life. Poor sound quality, plenty of background hiss, but the voices were clear. Not that it mattered—he’d listened enough times over the years to memorize the contents. Still, he took some pride in the job his technicians had done wiring the dacha. Neither of them had ever known. Not that that mattered either.

  A nurse stopped at his door, wrinkling her nose. He hadn’t seen her before. She frowned at him, the cigarette, and the NO SMOKING sign above his head. She started to speak, but his hard stare drew her eyes to the name on the end of the hospital bed. She gave a small shriek and scurried away. He went back to the tape.

  A TV played. The disembodied voice of the news reader described the carnage in central Moscow as firefighters fought to bring the blaze at Rosnobank under control. It would take them another fifteen hours, by which time the office tower would be only a charred shell. The death toll would just miss double digits. Could’ve been much worse, the Chekist thought, not for the first time. He’d taken all the precautions he could.

  Over the TV came the sounds of drawers being opened and closed, papers ruffled, the occasional curse, vodka poured into a glass. Kosokov was getting drunk while he got ready to run. He didn’t know he was already dead.

  Gorbenko’s voice. “You’ll never make it, you know. They’ll have men at every border crossing. They will have anticipated this.”

  “I’ll worry about making it,” Kosokov said. “If the Cheka’s as smart as everyone says it is, we’d all still be working for the Party.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Anatoly Andreivich. Look what they did to your bank. They’re shutting everything down, erasing all the tracks, eliminating all the links. You’re a very big link. You and I, we’re the only two who could expose everything.”

  “I’m counting on that fact to keep me alive. You made your deal, Boris. You’re on your own with it. I’ll take my chances by myself.”

  “You’re crazy! The CPS can provide protection. We can bring the Cheka down. Yeltsin will have no choice but to purge the entire organization when people see what they’ve done. It’s their one big weakness. No one will have difficulty believing they murdered innocent Russians to pursue their own ends. Especially once you and I lay out the evidence. Like the Katyn massacre. There will be national outrage.”

  “National outrage? Russia today? Hah! Don’t make me laugh. Neither of us will live to see it, in any event. Like I said, you made your deal. Good luck to you. I’m taking my evidence with me. My life insurance policy.”

  The crash of a door thrown open. Her voice. “Tolik, I came as soon as I could. What the hell is going on? What are you doing here? Oh … Who the hell are you?”

  Gorbenko said, “No names. Better that way. Call me Leo. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  “Tolik, what the hell is happening?”

  “Look at the TV. Your fucking husband is destroying everything. You, too. You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Lachko? What are you talking about?”

  “Look.”

  More TV noise for a minute, then Polina. “Jesus! That’s…”

  “That’s right. The bank. Maybe you’d prefer I was there.”

  “Don’t be an ass. What…”

  “The Cheka, you fool, that’s what. Covering their evil tracks.” A grunt as Kosokov pushed himself to his feet.

  “The fire, how did it start?” she said.

  “Start? It was set. The whole building, all at once, early this morning. WHOOSH!”

  “And you think the FSB…”

  “Think? Think? Polya, I know.”

  “But why?”

  “Polya, did it ever enter that beautiful, egocentric, self-centered, narcissistic head of yours that all your success, all those big property deals you engineered, all the money we made, in reality have nothing, as in not one fucking thing, to do with you?”

  “You’re drunk. This is nonsense.”

  “Nonsense? Nonsense, she says. Let me explain something, something that should be obvious, if you ever stopped to think about it. We’re the Cheka’s bank, Polya. We have been since 1992. We’ve financed more operations than I can count. I kept a record. It’s all on these CDs. I knew one day they wouldn’t need us anymore, that this is what would happen. These CDs might just keep us alive. Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

  Another stretch of silence, punctuated by periodic sounds from Kosokov.

  Some ten years earlier, in October 1999, the Chekist was already in his car, cursing snow and Moscow traffic and berating his driver to go faster toward Kosokov’s dacha. Now, listening for the hundredth—two hundredth?—time, he had no difficulty remembering each of the participants and every piece of bad luck he stumbled over that day. He fished out another cigarette as he waited for the moment Polina learned the truth.

  The tape rolled. Kosokov was pouring more vodka. Goddamned fool, the Chekist thought. You should have run. Right now. But you thought you could outsmart the Cheka. If you’d just run, maybe none of this would’ve happened.

  There it was, the quick intake of breath, followed by the curse. Then, “Jesus Christ, Tolik, what the hell have you done?”

  “Keep going, Polya. The best part’s at the end.”

  The Chekist stopped the tape and reached for the phone. Time to move. He wasn’t in the best shape for it—he was tired, and his chest ached. The doctors said he needed another couple of days, but he had no choice. To wait was to risk everything. Fucking Kosokov. Fucking Gorbenko. Fucking Rislyakov. Fucking Polina.

  He’d been sloppy ten years ago. Uncharacteristically so. Now he was paying for his negligence. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  CHAPTER 11

  Six fifteen A.M., eighty-five degrees, the air heavy enough to hold in my hands. I wake up at six, no matter what—a habit I’ve never been able to break. I live on South Street in what was once a warehouse serving the seaport two blocks north. The seaport is now a tourist attraction, and the warehouse had long fallen into disuse when enterprising artists converted its big, open floors into studios and residences. Initially they were illegal, but as with hundreds of loft buildings in New York, that eventually got sorted out, thanks to a lot of hard work, some legal wrangling, and a few envelopes filled with cash. In 1996, I moved in two years after it became kosher. In recent years, my neighbors who’ve been there since the beginning have started to acknowledge me.

  I own half the sixth floor in the back, away from the noise of the elevated FDR Drive, which passes outside our door. My windows face south and west into the canyons of Wall Street. I’ve kept the space mostly open—living area, bedroom, guest room, and baths in twenty-two h
undred square feet—a reaction to the cramped quarters of my childhood. It’s still more a commercial neighborhood than a residential one, but that doesn’t bother me. I like the solitude, especially at night. Another reaction.

  I stretched outside the building in my running clothes and an old painter’s hat. I took off to the south, picking up speed for the first half mile before settling into my normal gait, thinking about Polina, Ratko Rislyakov, and whether Marko and company had figured a way out of Jersey City.

  I did one of my five-mile loops, this one down through Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan and up the west side along the Hudson to Greenwich Village, where I turned east through the quiet cobbled streets all the way across the island before heading south again and home. I try to run at least five days a week, regardless of weather, although days like this make me question my resolve if not my sanity. On alternate mornings I take a shorter route and stop at the gym to work the weights.

  I arrived back in the neighborhood hot, soaked, and possibly enlightened—I had an idea where I’d seen Rislyakov’s name. I used to cool off strolling the Fulton Fish Market down the street, taking in the seafood and the characters who worked there, but the market’s moved up to the Bronx, and only a lingering fishy smell remains. They’ll have to tear up the asphalt to get rid of that. Today, I just walked around the block a couple of times and bought a bagel at the deli. I met Tina in the lobby, filling out her top beautifully, as she always did.

  “Off to work,” she chirped. Too bad. Well, it was a lousy day for sunbathing.

  I showered quickly, poured some coffee, and logged on to Ibansk.com. I paused to read Ivanov’s latest post. It started with his signature rant about how the Cheka, “the state within a state,” had taken over the state itself, along with everything else, as Vladimir Putin and Iakov Barsukov “dispatched Cheka operatives throughout the government, industrial, and criminal structures of Ibansk with the mission of throttling democracy, corrupting free enterprise, and coddling crooks. Most important, wrapping Cheka hands tight around any strings worth pulling.”

  Ivanov’s keyboard spews acid—he makes no attempt to be balanced. That’s one reason he’s as popular as he is. Power run amok—especially Cheka power—is unmitigated evil, in his single-minded opinion, and the only defense left is holding it up to the bright light of the blog. I don’t always agree, but it’s hard to argue with his basic premise. The fact is, the Cheka does pull about every string worth pulling in Russia these days, and has since the fall of the Yeltsin government. One of these strings is the regular media, all but entirely state controlled. Ivanov and a few others are lone voices trying to tell what they see as the truth in a thoroughly hostile environment. Truth, even imperfect truth, gave Ivanov a voice of authority. In a land where the official voice lied with impunity—confident that no one would notice or care—Ivanov shouted, “Pay attention!” as loud and long as he could. He screamed the truth as he saw it, just as Zinoviev, his Soviet-era predecessor, had done.

  Where Ivanov and I part company is the subject of Iakov Barsukov. To Ivanov, he’s the personification of Cheka malfeasance, Putin’s chief henchman in the inexorable extension of Cheka control. He may not be totally wrong about that—but to me, Iakov’s the man who plucked me from the living hell of my adolescence, recognized a talent, and gave me a chance for a career and a real life. Without him, I doubt I’d have made twenty. Even with everything that happened later—to me, to him, to our families, to our friendship—it’s hard to turn against a man like that.

  Ivanov had news.

  DIVINE JUSTICE … NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON?

  We hear that illness stalks the Barsukov clan—although confederation might be a more accurate term these days, as time, disagreement, and even accusations of disloyalty have driven the various members of the ferret family in diverse directions. Will the threat of mortality heal old wounds as it opens new ones?

  Iakov, père, of course, suffers from advanced age—something few Russians experience—and perennial bronchitis. Now son Lachko has been laid low with cancer of the esophagus. The result of a lifelong love of papirosi—or a sign from heaven that enough is enough? Ivanov is not privy to the thinking of the celestial authorities, but he can always hope.

  The Badger brothers, Lachko and Vasily, are Ibansk’s leading criminals. Vasily runs the rackets here in the old country with sharp claws and bloody teeth. Lachko was dispatched to New York when his checkered Cheka career—once destined for the pinnacle of Lubyanka—came to its ignominious end. Even those less cynical than Ivanov could question the wisdom of installing an officer once accused of smuggling, theft, and embezzlement as chief of the FSB’s Investigations Directorate, but consistency and common sense have never been Cheka hallmarks. Nepotism, on the other hand …

  Ivanov digresses. One thing is certain. Even the most powerful Chekist cannot outrun the clock. Time numbers their days. How many more does Lachko have? Ivanov has the best sources in Ibansk, but that has yet to be confided.

  He can hope, however.

  I scrolled back through Ivanov’s blog, looking for an old post. I stopped here and there to skim diatribes on the Cheka and the Barsukovs, making sure they added nothing to my current knowledge. Ibansk.com was a way to check in on a world I’d left behind and planned to continue to leave behind. Now, thanks in part to Ivanov himself, that world had jumped years of time, a continent, and an ocean to land here, today. Polina, Lachko, even the Cheka, all seemed to be chasing me down. How long before Ivanov started calling the race? After last night, on another sweaty New York morning, the world I was living in was feeling more and more like Fucktown.

  I kept scrolling and found what I was looking for, back in early May.

  WHERE’S RATKO?

  One of Ibansk’s more colorful, up-and-coming criminals (God knows, we have up-and-comers aplenty) has suddenly dropped from the scene.

  In the all-night-world all over Ibansk, from Moscow’s chanson clubs to Mayfair’s casinos to New York’s oh-so-hip (or should that be SoHo hip?) city-that-never-sleeps nightspots, the young and the reckless, feckless but rarely checkless, are asking the same question—Where’s Ratko?

  He cut—still cuts? (in Ibansk one must always ask)—a wide swath, does/did young Rad Rislyakov, who goes by nom de guerre Ratko Risly these days, owing to his uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. He is also resident high-tech guru in the Badgers’ criminal empire. Tech-savvy denizens may remember the electronic heist of 100 million identity files from the American retailing giant T.J. Maxx. The U.S. Justice Department made a splashy indictment of the participants a few years later. But Ivanov is told they didn’t get the mastermind—or half the take. Ratko Risly made his Badger bones on that scheme.

  I remembered that scheme. It had been the first really big heist of identity information—the one that put large-scale ID theft on the map. At least forty million accounts, maybe as many as a hundred million, as Ivanov claimed. Front-page news at the time. Front-page news again a few years later when one of the hackers heisted another hundred million credit card numbers, demonstrating the old fool-me-once/fool-me-twice adage was as apt as ever. Foos was bemused by the brazenness—the hackers literally reeled in their prey with a laptop and some wireless equipment readily purchasable on the Internet, sitting in a car in a strip mall parking lot. He was more appalled by the near total lack of security on the part of major retailing chains. Most of all, he wondered what the thieves planned to do with all those names and numbers.

  It appeared Rad Rislyakov—Ratko Risly—was a big-time player, which didn’t mesh on any of a number of levels with the lowlifes supposedly working for him, and certainly not with the three Ukrainians I’d met last night in Jersey City.

  Ivanov had more to add.

  Ratko burns the candle at both ends—on three continents. For the last few months, he’s been seen in the company of an auburn-haired, blue-eyed creature, as gorgeous as any beauty in Ibansk—no exaggeration, Ivanov swears!—but then he and she dropped ou
t of sight. Ivanov is doubly curious because heretofore Ratko has been seen mainly in the company of pretty young men. A foot in each camp, perhaps.

  Did the Badger Brothers rein in their wayward genius, fearing he could flame out? Ivanov hears he’s been busy building a new profit center for the Barsukov empire—a high-tech, hush-hush money laundry capable of making billions vanish into the international ether. Perhaps he was attracting the wrong kind of attention to his own exploits. Many avenues for Ivanov to explore. Stay tuned!

  Could there be two Rad Rislyakovs? Unlikely. The photo in my pocket of Eva Mulholland—an “auburn-haired, blue-eyed beauty” if there ever was one—made it more so. But if Ratko was such a big-shot, globe-trotting, jet-setting, high-tech crook, why was he pretending to screw around with penny-ante kidnapping?

  One more manifestation of Fucktown?

  One way to find out—ask.

  * * *

  It was still early, but Chelsea bustles at all hours, especially along Sixth Avenue, where the big discount emporia have reclaimed the elegant limestone buildings constructed originally as department stores for the carriage trade. Times change. In New York, commerce adapts and carries on. Yet Mother Nature can work her will, even in the concrete jungle, and this morning, the heat sucked life from the street. A cab dropped me outside Rislyakov’s luxury loft conversion. (New York is still waiting for its first nonluxury conversion.)

  The lobby was all blond wood and stainless steel. A uniformed doorman, Hispanic, early thirties, sat behind a circular counter. I told him who I was there to see.

  He shook his head. “Not home.”

  “When was the last time he was home?”

  “Can’t say. We’re not allowed—”