Badger Games

by Jon A. Jackson

  That was a nasty swipe. As much as to say, You blew it, you bungler. Now make us look good.

  “I’ll get on it right away, sir.”

  In fact, the shuttle got him from National to La Guardia a little after eleven o’clock. Ten minutes later, Max Kravfurt was driving him to a rendezvous with a Detective Porter, in Brooklyn.

  “How are you getting along with Barnes, Max?” the colonel asked, as they drove.

  He listened with interest to Kravfurt’s cautiously worded complaints about bureaucratic pusillanimity. Tucker wanted to hear genuine gripes, not sour grapes. He had sounded Kravfurt out in the past on this and found him a potential candidate for the Lucani. Now was a good time to audition Kravfurt’s song, to hear if he at least got all the notes right.

  “You don’t have to sugarcoat it, Max,” he said. “We’re in this together. You should have seen me kissing the cardinal’s ring about an hour ago. What a desk jockey!”

  Kravfurt was eager to yodel. He immediately launched into an aria about an operation he’d been on a few months earlier.

  “Are we talking about that Congressman Heller sting?” the colonel asked at one point, interrupting the diatribe. “I didn’t know you were involved in that. Who else was on the case?”

  “It was a cousin of mine who tipped me,” Kravfurt assured him. “We grew up in the same neighborhood as Heller. Mike knew him better than I did. He called me, said Heller was living pretty rich, new cars, a house in Florida, shtupping some kid half his age, a dancer at Tori’s. Twenty-year marriage crashing. Worse, he’s hanging out with some old neighborhood mopes. Well, you know a congressman: he’s got backers, they throw him stock tips, pad his campaign fund—he’s bound to be doing all right. But it was more than that. These are mob guys, dealers, he’s hanging with. They’re cutting him into the distribution end, and Heller’s into the coke himself. He was making an ass of himself.

  “I developed the whole case, me and Aaron. Then what happens? When I set up the buy, Heller sends some hood Aaron remembered from that LaGuardia case, doesn’t show himself. We brought in that babe that worked on the Franko stuff overseas, Jamala Sanders—you remember her?”

  “Sanders? Sure. Why her?” the colonel said.

  “She can look black,” Kravfurt said. “Plays it real good. And she hasn’t been seen around here. Anyway, she’s the buyer. When Heller doesn’t show, she pitches a monumental bitch, takes a hike. Smart gal. So we go through the whole thing again. Aaron tells Heller that she got spooked, something about the contact. She thought he was a rat, maybe working off a rap for the feds. Heller says that’s bullshit. Anyway, to make a long story short, he finally agrees to meet her himself. We had a man with a long lens, got photos, tapes, the coke, marked money he deposits in his own bank account, the whole schmear.”

  “So what happened? How did Heller walk?”

  “Politics,” Kravfurt said, a clear, pure note of disgust. “Somebody owed somebody. All I know is Barnes calls me and Aaron in, says the evidence was tainted. We’re transferred to another case. Lucky we weren’t sent to another division, even fired. We’d messed the whole thing up. Heller quits Congress, pleads bad health. That was the deal they worked with him, obviously. He’s down in Florida, now, free as a bird.”

  This was the sort of thing that the colonel wanted. He could check it out with Jammie. The sooner the better. But first, Ostropaki.

  Detective Porter and his assistant, Detective Cook, met them in a coffee shop on Flatbush Avenue. Some NYPD undercover cops were watching the house. It was an apartment building, actually, an older place just a few blocks away. A number of Muslims lived in the building, Albanians. Ostropaki could be staying with any of them. They couldn’t be sure which apartment. The plan was to wait for him to come out. As soon as he tried to drive anywhere he could be pulled over for some real or imagined violation. Then Porter and Cook would be called in. Ostropaki would be taken to the precinct. Tucker could talk to him there. If necessary, some coke could be “found” in the Ostropaki car.

  “That won’t be necessary,” the colonel said. “We’ve got legitimate reasons to ask him questions about operations outside the country. But if you want to …”

  Porter and Cook could wait on that, they said. They’d like to see what came out. “Hell, with any luck,” Cook chimed in, “the guy will be making another delivery.”

  They all went for a drive-by, to look at the house. It was an ordinary brick building, three stories, no elevator. Four apartments on each floor, but from what the undercover guys had seen, it looked like a couple of hundred people lived there, Porter told them. Well, maybe not that many, but many more than one would expect. Could be a violation of housing ordinances—a dozen apartments converted into two dozen, or more. Almost bound to be. Foreign types coming and going more or less constantly. Nobody seemed to work. Women in shawls, men in funny hats.

  The four men returned to the diner to wait, chatting, talking shop. Tucker was anxious to get away, not only from the detectives but from Max. He wanted to call Jammie, find out what was going down in Montana. He had a feeling that Joe would be able to wrap that up. Maybe the thing to do was simply go back to the Manhattan office with Kravfurt, since Ostropaki didn’t show any sign of moving. He and Max could always be called when the pickup occurred. The only thing was, he wanted to be on the spot, in case Ostropaki began to talk. Tucker wanted him to talk, but not too freely. He wanted to get Jammie back, now. Let Joe do his thing.

  About one, the watchers called in. An unexpected type had shown up at the apartment house, in a cab. A burly man in a black suit, carrying a briefcase. He’d gone into the house.

  “A delivery!” Cook declared. “Mr. Big! Let’s go in.”

  “Mr. Big?” Porter laughed. “We don’t have a make on him. We don’t know which apartment he went into. Maybe he has nothing to do with our delivery boy. We’d never get a warrant on that.”

  “A burly guy, in his sixties?” Cook said. “We give him an ID! Sounds like Boomie Karns,” he said.

  They amused themselves trying to attach a name and face to this “burly” visitor. About forty minutes passed, and Tucker began to think that he could reasonably plead a lunch date. He had a feeling that if Ostropaki had been up all night, he might not be going out, if at all, before late afternoon. By now, he thought, Jammie and Joe had probably taken care of Bazok. He was anxious to know.

  Then the word came: Ostropaki was on the move. The detectives took their car, Tucker rode with Kravfurt. The cops had allowed Ostropaki to get well away from the house but stopped him before he got on the freeway. The cops had pulled him over on a side street.

  “Thanks, guys,” Porter told the uniforms as he approached Ostropaki’s car. “We’ll take him. Get this car towed. We’ll want a thorough search of it.”

  The colonel and Kravfurt watched from their car. “That’s him, all right,” Tucker said. They followed the detectives to the precinct. The detectives had Ostropaki in an interrogation room when the colonel and Kravfurt entered.

  “Colonel!” Ostropaki said. He looked relieved. He smiled and stood up to hold out his hand. But the colonel ignored it, giving him a cold look. Ostropaki, chastened, sat down again.

  The colonel took a chair across the table from Ostropaki. A tape recorder sat on the table, but not turned on. The colonel knew that they were being recorded, however. This was a delicate moment.

  Tucker gestured at the tape machine and asked Porter, “How does this work?” Porter showed him. Tucker turned on the machine and gave the date, the time, the place, then identified himself and those present. Ostropaki watched quietly.

  “The subject is known to me as Theodore Ostropaki,” the colonel said. “Is that your correct name? Please speak up. Give us your nationality and date of entry to the United States, how you arrived …”

  Ostropaki was very cooperative. He had entered two days earlier, was visiting friends and professional contacts. He gave the address of the apartment and the names of
the friends. They were Albanian immigrants. He worked for an international refugee organization and was here to provide information about missing relatives, that sort of thing. It all sounded quite legitimate and reasonable. The colonel had his passport. It had been issued by the Albanian government, where he now resided. The date on it was a week old.

  The colonel asked him about that. Ostropaki explained that he had been a refugee himself. He’d been caught in the outbreak of hostilities in Kosovo and had fled with people who protected him, to Albania. There, for many reasons, he began to involve himself in the refugee problem. Ultimately, he went to work for the agency that had helped him. He hadn’t needed a passport before this, his first trip out of the country.

  “What did you do in Kosovo?” the colonel asked.

  “I was sales representative for a large firm in Athens,” Ostropaki said. “Building supplies. I traveled all over … Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia. I have very good languages, you see. I speak Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Romanian …” He went on, describing this good, well-paying job. He seemed calm, as if he knew that all this was a mere formality and soon he would be allowed to return to his friends.

  “Where were you going just now?” the colonel asked.

  “Breakfast,” Ostropaki said. “I was up late last night and slept in.”

  “What were you doing last night?” the colonel asked.

  “I had to meet a man whose family is still in Serbia,” Ostropaki said. “He works what he calls a graveyard shift? In Serbia he was surgeon, here he is emergency-room technician at a hospital in Manhattan—I think he operates the machines that say if one is still alive, something like that. I delivered to him some letters from his family. He has an uncle in Albania, at one of the camps, waiting to return to Serbia.” He gave the man’s name and where he worked.

  The colonel looked up at Porter, who nodded to Cook, who left the room, obviously to check on this alleged hospital technician. This was not going as they’d expected. Every one of the officers in the room had the dull feeling that the man just described would turn out to be a solid witness for Ostropaki. The colonel, however, felt his spirits lift.

  “I was hoping to see you, while I am here, just a few days,” Ostropaki said to the colonel. “You were so”—he hesitated, then found the right word—“amiable, when we met in—”

  Before he could say “Athens,” the colonel reached over and punched the stop button on the recorder. He got up and went outside. Porter and Kravfurt followed.

  “Well, that’s a loser,” Tucker said in the hall, with a rueful look on his face. “We interviewed him in Athens a couple of years back, thinking he might be a useful correspondent, since he traveled to Serbia quite a bit. Then we lost track of him. Nothing came of it.”

  “That was your interest?” Porter said.

  “It looked different,” the colonel said. “There was always the possibility that he might have contacts with the Zivkovic group, in Serbia. But now, it sounds to me like someone set him up. What do you think?”

  “Why would someone set him up?” Kravfurt said.

  “Who knows? Maybe to discredit him with this refugee organization,” the colonel said. “It could have been some internal dispute. These people are notoriously divided among themselves. One faction opposes another, and they’re all engaged in the same cause! Or it could have been some Serb group that found out about Ostropaki’s mission, got some inside information on this meeting with the doctor, or whatever he is.”

  Porter seemed to buy it, especially when Cook returned with the news that Ostropaki’s contact was an emergency-room technician at the hospital. Porter was disgusted. He had wasted his day, and his men. “What do you want to do with him?” he asked the colonel.

  “I’d like to talk to him some more, see what he knows. He might have some useful information about other people we’re interested in, people who also disappeared during the NATO bombing. But I think it would have to be in a more congenial setting. If by chance he comes out with something of interest, I’ll let you know, of course. In the meantime, perhaps you could run a record check on this ex-surgeon fellow who works at the hospital. Doctors have been known to have drug associations. If that proves questionable, we know where Ostropaki is.”

  Porter muttered something derisive and said, “Yeah, take him away. I’ll get a release for his car. Don’t forget to call. You owe us one.”

  The colonel ushered Ostropaki out of the precinct station. It had helped that Ostropaki’s rental car had been clean. To Kravfurt, he said, “Theo can take me back to the airport. I’d like to chat with him about his experiences.”

  Kravfurt said, “Fine. Don’t forget me, Colonel. This looked like a good thing.”

  The colonel assured him that he appreciated being called and said Max could expect to hear from him before long. As soon as Kravfurt had gone and they were driving away, the colonel said to Ostropaki, “Was that you who called?”

  “It was a friend of mine. I told him to ask for Kravfurt, because he was with you in Athens, that time.”

  “So, Theo,” the colonel said, as they drove toward La Guardia, “how did you manage not to get killed? I thought the Zivkovic people were on to you.”

  “Oh, they were. The minute I returned to Belgrade, I was arrested. Vjelko was behind it. He was tight with the regime. They were all in the drug trade. They kept me in a rather nasty jail, questioned me about Franko. But I had nothing to tell them.”

  The colonel could tell from his reticence that it had been a painful and humiliating experience, not to say potentially fatal. It was clear that Ostropaki was not eager to talk about it, but it was necessary. The colonel pressed him. The story was a depressingly familiar one of beatings, threats, torture, and terror. Of particular interest was the degree of cooperation between an outright gangster like Zivkovic and the highest reaches of the regime, including the police.

  “Finally, they put me in a camp,” Ostropaki said. “I thought they would kill me there. They killed so many. Sometimes, one of Vjelko’s men would come to question me again. One of them, a very bad man named Bazok, was especially crude. He asked me about Franko—did I know him? I didn’t know who he was talking about, I said.

  “I think because I was a foreigner it saved me. At last, one of my old construction customers in Belgrade, a friend of mine, heard I was there and began to ask questions. He was important to the government. They drove me into Kosovo in the middle of the night, pushed me out of the car, and told me to start walking. I thought they would shoot me, but they didn’t. I was telling the truth about the refugees, you know.”

  “It sounded authentic, anyway,” the colonel said. They found a spot in the US Airways parking lot at La Guardia and walked to the terminal. “Why did you go to such lengths to contact me?”

  “Colonel, I am worried about you. I was coming to the United States, anyway, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet with you.”

  “You’re worried about me? Why didn’t you just call me?”

  “I didn’t think it would be wise. I’ll explain. You remember that we talked once about the difficulties you had with getting your country to carry through on their drug policies? Yes? I thought you were trying to recruit me.”

  “Well, as to that … ,” the colonel said, hesitating. “But I did recruit you, on the Franko operation.”

  “Yes, but you insisted we keep the Franko connection to ourselves,” Ostropaki said. “I don’t accuse you! You were right to do so, as events proved. The effect was the same. It was better that I not know too much. Do you think we could stop for some coffee? Or are you in a hurry?”

  “I have all the time you need,” the colonel said. They bought coffee at a food stand.

  “Last week an American woman came to see me, in Tirana,” Ostropaki said. “I had seen her before. She was with some US AID officials then. This time she came alone. She asked me questions about my involvement with the DEA. I didn’t know what to say. She showed me a picture of you.
I admitted that I had met you, in Athens. I told her that you had asked me some general questions about Serbia, where I had been, what I had seen.”

  This was the genuine Balkan reserve, the colonel thought. Perhaps it was too much to call it paranoia. “Why didn’t you tell her about working for us?”

  “She didn’t offer anything,” Ostropaki said simply. “She didn’t even say she was with the DEA. She never mentioned any specific operations—not a word about Franko, at first. Just asked if I had supplied information or had otherwise assisted the DEA in Serbia. So how could I think that she knew anything, or that I should share what I knew? Besides, she seemed interested in something else. She showed me a photograph of Franko, taken in Kosovo, it appeared. Did I know this man? I told her I didn’t know him. She asked me if I had ever heard of an American agent named Franko Bradovic. From a village named Tsamet, in the mountains. I told her I had driven through Tsamet, once, but I didn’t know this man. Finally, she asked me if I’d ever heard anything about an inner group, within the DEA. Whether you had mentioned such a group.”

  “What kind of group?” the colonel asked. “Some ultrasecret agency? A special task force, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” Ostropaki said. He pushed his coffee away with distaste. “That was the sort of thing I asked her. But she said, no, it was not an official group. It was independent agents who had, perhaps, agreed to assist each other in extralegal activities. She didn’t elaborate.”

  “Aha!” the colonel said. “Corrupt agents, working with the smugglers, eh?”

  “That’s what I assumed,” Ostropaki said. He looked quite neutral, but a little self-conscious.

  “Well, there are such agents, as we all know,” the colonel said. “It’s a major problem in drug enforcement. More so than in any other aspect of criminal law—not just undercover agents, but administrators, even prosecutors and judges. It’s the money that’s involved … so much money. But you’re well aware of this; we’ve discussed it.”