Rasputin's Shadow

by Raymond Khoury

  Too many questions. Too many unknowns.

  I walked into the bathroom to have a look. It was pretty basic. Sink, mirror, toilet, bathtub with a fixed showerhead. Old-style column radiator, small window mounted high, white floor tiles. Reasonably clean. The bath’s shower curtain was dry, its soap bar unopened, its large towels unused. The Russians clearly hadn’t been there for too long, which wasn’t surprising. I didn’t think they were staying there.

  “No luggage, right?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  I was getting impatient with myself. We were playing catch-up while the bodies were piling up. I unconsciously stopped in front of the mirror and stared at myself for a moment, willing myself to figure this out before more bodies dropped, then as I turned away, something snagged my attention. A small glint, coming from behind the radiator.

  I crossed over to it and bent down for a closer look. There was definitely something there, small and silver. It had been jammed in from the side. I took out my pen and nudged it around until it broke loose and fell to the floor.

  I picked it up. It was a watch. But not a normal watch with a wristband. This was a fob watch, hanging from a short, two-inch chain.

  A nurse’s fob watch.

  “Check this out,” I called out to Aparo.

  He stepped in. I held it up to him.

  “Daphne Sokolov?” he asked.

  “Got to be. She was here.” The watch jump-started my mind, which had started screening various possible scenarios.

  “So that’s what the shooters were doing,” Aparo said. “They came for her.”

  “Or for them,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe she and Sokolov were both being held here.”

  “Or maybe she was being held here and Sokolov came for her,” Aparo offered.

  “Our meek science teacher turning into the Terminator? I’m not sure I buy that.”

  Aparo pursed his lips in agreement. “Maybe he recruited some muscle to break her out.”

  “Maybe.” I frowned, frustrated by what I felt we were getting sucked into. “Here’s our problem. We don’t know anything about this Sokolov, and I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere until we do.”

  I tried to take a step back and process what we knew and what we were seeing.

  The one-eyed bandit is outside Sokolov’s place while, up in the apartment, there’s a scuffle that ends with a Russian diplomat going through a window and falling to his death. Were they there together—in which case, why was our dearly departed diplomat openly cavorting with a tattooed Russian gangster?—or was the heavy watching the diplomat? Then we have Sokolov’s wife going missing that same morning. Cyclops ends up here, with another Russian wiseguy, and they’ve got at least Daphne Sokolov locked up in the bathroom. Maybe Sokolov, too. The detectives and two men in black show up here, and end up leaking all over the lobby. Then the killers take out our Russian heavies and leave with Daphne, and maybe her husband, too.

  Too many maybes.

  I bent down to look at the base of the radiator, wondering if she’d been held there, if she’d been cuffed to it and if anyone else had too. It was definitely the best option. The towel rail wouldn’t handle anything with more muscle than a two-year-old. Same for the shower rail. And the base of the toilet, well, that would’ve been just nasty. And cumbersome.

  Then I saw something else. On the base of the wall, above the row of tiles that skirted it. Something had been scratched into the paint.

  I leaned in for a closer look.

  They were letters. Cyrillic letters.

  I looked at the watch again. It had a safety-pin fastener, like on a brooch. Which could easily have been used to carve the letters.

  “There’s something here,” I told Aparo. “In Russian.”

  Aparo got down on his haunches for a closer look. “What does it say?”

  “Hang on.” I pulled out my smart phone, launched the Google Search app, and went to Google Translate. I selected Russian to English, brought up the Cyrillic keypad, and typed in the word: . It came back with what it sounded like, kuvalda, and what it meant in English.

  I told Aparo.

  He gave me an impressed nod. I nodded back. We both knew what this meant. Daphne Sokolov had definitely been held here. And to find out why, we now knew who to talk to. A Russian mobster who’d been on the Bureau’s radar for years. A smug slimeball by the name of Yuri Mirminsky, nicknamed kuvalda.

  The Sledgehammer.

  19

  Leo Sokolov was back in his ratty hotel room, standing by the grimy window, staring out at the noisy, traffic-clogged street below.

  He was angry at himself. He’d almost screwed everything up with his impetuousness, which wasn’t like him. Sokolov wasn’t a rash person. He normally thought things through, took his time. If anything, he was usually overly cautious and analytical. And yet here, faced with a crisis, he’d jumped into the deep end without checking the pool first.

  He was lucky to be alive—and free. Very lucky. He thought back to his failed attempt at kidnapping Rogozin and realized how close he was to it all going seriously wrong. He caught a ghostly reflection of his face in the glass and felt a pang of shame and remorse. He chided himself again. He couldn’t do this. Not like that. He’d thought it would work out, his being brazen, as he had been all those years ago, when he’d outwitted his CIA handlers. But this was a different world, and he was a different man.

  He couldn’t afford to fail again. He’d need to do better.

  And he needed to get help. He couldn’t do it alone. Not anymore.

  He didn’t move for more than an hour. He just stood there, in the darkness, staring out into the night, oblivious to the bustle of the city outside his grimy window.

  Remembering. Thinking. Searching for an inspiration, for someone he could turn to.

  An ally.

  Then, out of the confusion in his mind, a name came forth.

  He didn’t want to drag anyone else into the chaos of his now-exploded life, but he really didn’t have a choice if he was ever going to see his Daphne again. And who better than someone who, against all of Sokolov’s advice, seemed incapable of doing anything else than dedicating himself to a life of crime.

  Jonny.

  He needed to find Jonny.

  20

  The Sledgehammer.

  Yet another of the high-quality individuals we’d welcomed to our land of opportunity with open arms, only to end up bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

  I’m not sure that he was tired, poor, huddled, or yearning to breathe free when we let him in. In fact, I can’t imagine that the person who rubber-stamped his visa didn’t have a pretty good idea of what kind of lowlife he really was. But we still let him in, and here we were, sixteen years later, wasting time and money investigating his sordid activities and looking for a way to either lock him up—and waste more time and money that way—or kick him back out.

  Same old, same old.

  Yuri Mirminsky came into the country on a business visa, indicating he’d be working in the movie industry. When we got our first taste of what he was really up to, we discovered that the real reason he’d left Moscow was because it had become too dangerous for him there, what with the savage competition between Mafiya mobsters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, Mirminsky never made it to Hollywood. He got busy right here in New York and was running one of the strongest ROC groups on the whole East Coast.

  Yeah, we’ve even got an acronym for it. ROC. Russian organized crime.

  Collateral damage from the fall of Communism.

  I often wondered if we’d have been better off with the Evil Empire still in place.

  The Sledgehammer’s talent was much like Lucky Luciano’s. He was an organizer. He took bit gangs of Russian bangers and stitched them together into one big crime corporation, with him running the show. And his talent served him well. His branch of the Solntsevskaya gang now had more than two hundred upstanding immigrants living among us and beaver
ing away at drug-running, extortion, and a whole bunch of other fine pursuits.

  The first time I heard of him, I remember wondering where he got the nickname. My wishful thinking was that he’d been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel. Maybe he was. I mean, back then, who wasn’t? But this sledgehammer was different. It originated from his early days in Russia, before he came to the States. After the Wall came down. Back when he was an out-of-work KGB “niner,” an unemployed member of its Ninth Directorate who’d gone from muscleman providing protection to the Kremlin’s top dogs to up-and-coming bratok—a low-level Mafiya thug. Yuri got into a fight with some poor schmuck and he punched him so hard the guy’s guts spilled out. Literally. The guy had recently had surgery and his stitches hadn’t been out for that long, but still. One punch.

  I don’t know about the choice of nickname. I’d have gone with Drago. Or Popeye. But maybe that last one was too American. Besides, the French Connection movie had it locked down. For my generation, anyway.

  The problem was, Mirminsky was insulated. I’d never met the guy, but the Bureau had been involved in a couple of cases over the years that linked back to him, the most recent of which was a colossal fraud where Mirminsky and his associates operated dozens of small medical “no-fault” clinics and bilked car-insurance companies out of tens of millions of dollars for fictitious treatments of car-accident victims. We never got anywhere near taking him down. Mirminsky was a smart vor—what Russian Mafiya bosses were called, short for vor y zakone, meaning “thief-in-law”—and he knew how to work the system. He never had any direct involvement with any of his cabal’s dirty deeds. Nothing ever got tied back to him, which is how it was with most, if not all, of the Russian mobsters who’d left the old country for the security and due process of the West. They raped and pillaged, they partied, we watched.

  Depressing stuff.

  Still, he’d lost two underlings here, which was something to smile about. And he was also clearly involved in whatever had led to the death of two NYPD detectives, which was going to bring down some serious heat on him.

  Maybe his days on our sunny shores were numbered.

  I wasn’t holding my breath. But I was happy to do everything I could to help bring that about.

  “We ought to pay the Sledgehammer a visit,” I told Aparo as we hit traffic on the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. “Rattle his gilded penthouse of a cage.”

  Aparo didn’t answer immediately. I glanced across and saw that he had a little grin going.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  He put on a mock-pensive look, then said, “I think we should. But before we do that, I think we need to rattle someone else’s cage before she gets too much of a heads-up about what just went down.”

  I knew exactly what he was thinking. And, in fairness, I’d been thinking the same thing. We also needed to know more about what seemed to be the key to all this: Sokolov. Which was why I called Larisa Tchoumitcheva right there and then and told her we needed to meet, pronto.

  “J. G. Melon’s in an hour,” I told Aparo after I hung up with her. Then I added, “I don’t have time to drop you off at the office. York Street subway station good for you?”

  His face dropped for only a couple of seconds before he realized I was kidding, but those seconds were priceless.

  ***

  LARISA HUNG UP WITH Reilly, thought about it, then dialed another number.

  Her boss took her call promptly.

  “I just got a call from Reilly. He wants to meet.”

  “Good,” the man answered. “We need to know more about what happened at the motel. Have you heard anything new?”

  “No more than we already know. Koschey took out the two bratki who were watching over Sokolov’s wife.”

  “Which means he’s got her now,” the man said. “And he’ll use her to draw Sokolov out.”

  “No doubt.”

  Larisa’s boss went quiet for a moment, then said, “We can’t let Sokolov slip out of our hands. Do you understand? This is imperative. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

  Still with the secrecy, Larisa fumed inwardly. But she knew better than to ask. They’d already made it clear that Sokolov’s CV was beyond her need to know. And so far, her attempts to gain access to his file had failed.

  She masked her frustration and said, “I understand.”

  “Call me back when you’re done,” he told her. “And Larisa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Get him to like you.”

  21

  Koreatown, Manhattan

  The train rumbled into Thirty-fourth Street, causing Sokolov to force his eyes open and pull himself to his feet.

  He’d spent the whole ride thinking about the eager-to-please sixteen-year-old who had shown so much promise and, in particular, such a flair for science, when he first became Sokolov’s pupil. Sokolov had done everything he could to encourage and help the boy—from after-school coaching to loaning him books from his own collection. But when the change happened, it appeared to take place overnight. Yaung John-Hee—or simply Jonny, without the “h,” as he was known at school—had started off by skipping homework assignments and coming into school late. Then he started missing whole days, and he’d finally ended up getting expelled when a gun was found in his backpack.

  How it had gotten there wasn’t cut-and-dry. Not even close.

  Jonny had consistently stuck to his story. He said he’d just happened to find the gun in Clearview Park. What complicated the matter was that the Beretta 9mm turned out to be free of prints—except for Jonny’s—and the police to whom it had mandatorily been reported linked it to three deaths. They suspected it actually belonged to Jonny’s older brother, Kim-Jee, a low-level dealer in one of the city’s Korean gangs. And Jonny had a rock-solid alibi for the night of the killings, so the police had nothing with which to pressure him.

  At each step, Sokolov had tried to talk the boy around, to try to turn him away from the violent and self-destructive black hole that was drawing him in. At each step, Jonny had pretended to listen, then he’d just continued down his own path. Sokolov had even put himself on the line. He had vouched for the kid with both the school’s principal and the cops when Jonny had been suspected of dealing drugs at the school. He had assured anyone who would listen that Jonny was different from his brother. That he wanted to go to college and become an engineer. That he and Jonny had an understanding. Then, three years ago, there was this business with the gun, and Sokolov couldn’t protect him anymore. Nor did he really want to. He was left looking ridiculous. He was still angry about how Jonny had managed to deceive him so completely, still unsure about whether he had been played the entire time or whether Jonny had honestly tried to stay on the right side of the law but hadn’t been strong enough to resist his brother’s pull.

  At the moment, it was that calculating ability to lie that Sokolov was counting on. Perhaps Jonny even had traces of remorse about how he had manipulated Sokolov and rendered him unreliable in the eyes of the school’s board. So much about high school was the ability to read character, and Sokolov, who had always prided himself on his skills in this area, had proven himself fallible.

  Sokolov dragged himself up the stairs at Herald Square and set off down Sixth Avenue. The shops were empty and the Empire State Building loomed overhead like a giant sentry. Sokolov tucked his hands deeper into his pockets, where he again felt the cool grip of the handgun. He found it oddly disconcerting that there he was, all that time later, coming to see Jonny, and that it was he who was carrying a gun. Desperate times, desperate measures, he reminded himself, and pushed the discomfort away as he turned onto Thirty-third Street and followed it into the heart of Koreatown.

  After the cops had raided the back room of the community center in Murray Hill where the brothers used to hang out, Kim-Jee and Jonny had begun to spend much more time in Koreatown. They’d eventually started working at their aunt’s restaurant, the Green Dragon, which was right in the heart of Koreatown, betw
een Thirty-third and Thirty-second streets. Sokolov had even gone there one night, about two years ago, to try to talk some sense into Jonny yet again, but he’d given up and gone home without even setting foot inside. He’d heard that since then, Kim-Jee had risen through the ranks of the gang, with Jonny riding in his wake. Anything more than that would be a guess. Better to see for himself, now that he was there.

  He walked past several small clusters of diners who’d stepped outside for a smoke and went in. He knew he was taking a risk just walking into the restaurant unannounced, but as he had already convinced himself on the way over, he really didn’t have a choice. It was a fair bet that, whether he was a fugitive or not, Jonny’s relatives would be reluctant to call the cops to their premises whatever the circumstances. Not after everything Sokolov had done for Jonny.

  The place was huge, and bustling. Even though it was almost two in the morning, the Green Dragon was almost full. Korean pop music blaring from speakers and the din of multiple conversations fought for airspace with the sound of tables being cleared and food being delivered to customers. Almost the entire clientele was Korean, though a table by the window was occupied by a group of young tourists clearly enjoying the authentic atmosphere and cuisine.

  Sokolov walked over to the hostess, a petite woman in her twenties wearing a white silk dress decorated with a single green dragon that looked like it was coiled around her torso.

  “Is Yaung John-Hee here?”

  The woman’s expression didn’t change at all.

  “I’m his teacher. Well, I was,” he explained. “I used to teach him science. At Flushing High School.”

  The woman’s eyebrows slid upward almost imperceptibly.

  “I need to talk to him,” he pressed on. “Tell him—tell him Mr. Soko is here. Tell him I need to see him. And tell him . . .” He hesitated. “Tell him I saw Kim-Jee give him something. He’ll understand.”