Winter Palace

by T. Davis Bunn

  “This group is Saint Petersburg’s main anti-mafia squad,” the Consul General explained. “I’ve worked with them on a couple of items before, and think you should trust them. I do.”

  “Hits go for about two hundred dollars these days,” the young man continued. He was dressed in rundown denims and a shirt that had seen better days. He needed a shave and a month of dedicated sleep. But his voice carried the authority of hands-on experience.

  “Soakings, they’re called. We get seven to ten of them a day just inside this city. The Azerbaijani mafia is battling for control of the central markets, so right now we’re seeing a lot of intergang killings, more than usual. The Uzbekis are big in the local hash and marijuana trade. The Chechen control most roads and harbors. The Georgian mafia controls most of the restaurants. The Siberian clans control the flow of gold and diamonds and furs. The Ingush are big in protection and shakedowns.”

  “What about kidnappings?” Allbright asked.

  A flash of grim humor circled the room after the young man had translated. “Everybody,” he replied flatly.

  “And treasure?”

  A glimmer of new interest surfaced. “Stolen?”

  The Consul General turned to Jeffrey and waited. This was his ball to play as he chose. Jeffrey hesitated, knowing for certain what Yussef would think of his sharing the information with the KGB. Finally, he decided to go with his gut. “In the Ukraine. From a church.”

  Swiftly the information was translated. Then, “Value?”

  “Big. Very big. Hard to say without having seen it, but from what I’ve heard, well over a million.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  The group exchanged glances, and one of them released a silent sigh. “We have been hearing rumors,” the young man explained. “A couple of pieces missing here, more there, little bits and pieces that alone are not too much, never too much. Never as much as what you are saying, not apart. But together?” He shrugged. “A fortune.”

  “Any idea who’s behind it?” Allbright demanded.

  “We don’t know if what we hear is true at all. But we hear there is a gathering of pieces.”

  Allbright shot Jeffrey a quick glance. “Here in Saint Petersburg?”

  The young man shrugged. “Rumors only. But we think yes.”

  “It would be logical,” the Consul General speculated. “The ports around here have the greatest amount of traffic with the West. And Saint Petersburg is the city closest to the Finnish border.”

  The young man shook his head. “Something this big, I think by sea.”

  Casey spoke up. “What about the Tombek clan?”

  The room’s atmosphere instantly rose to a new level of intensity. Even those who spoke no English reacted to the sound of that name. The young man asked, “What about them?”

  “Are they involved in kidnappings?”

  “They are involved in everything,” he replied flatly. “Especially things that make big money.”

  “Like kidnapping foreigners,” Casey persisted.

  “Maybe. Why do you think they are involved?”

  “Casey thought he spotted a couple of their men following Mr. Sinclair,” Allbright explained. “Near to where Miss Stevens was taken.”

  “Not think,” Casey corrected. “Know.”

  Alert gray eyes focused on Jeffrey. “You were followed by Tombek?”

  “So he says.”

  Glances were exchanged with other members of the team. “You are still alive?”

  Jeffrey fought off a sudden chill. “As far as I can tell.”

  “Tombek is Chechen,” the man said, as though that were all the explanation required.

  Casey explained to Jeffrey, “Chechen is a tribe from the Caucasus region of southern Russia. They are winning the bloody gang war for control of the Moscow markets.”

  “Here, too, they are a problem,” the young man added. “Very dangerous. Very deadly. Many killers.”

  Allbright asked, “Have you heard anything about them moving into stolen treasures?”

  There was a moment’s quiet discussion, a chorus of head shakes. “Nothing,” the young man replied. “But Chechen control much of the ports and international harbor traffic.”

  “Like drugs,” Casey explained to Jeffrey. “Raised in the southern reaches of the country, then exported to Western Europe and America.”

  “Big in trade,” the young man continued. “Like importing stolen cars or exporting Russian factory goods. We have heard they are making big contracts with Western companies to supply steel. They have plans to make everything look legal.”

  “Front,” Casey offered. “They have a Western group that is going to front for the gang.”

  “Yes. This we have heard. There is much money in such trade, especially if they can make it look all legal with such a front.”

  “But no treasures?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Or kidnappings?” Allbright added.

  “Who knows with Tombek? They are always hungry, always growing. Never enough. And always danger. There is great danger with all Chechen, but especially Tombek. Their only answer to a problem is to kill.”

  Allbright demanded, “So you’ll check it out?”

  There was a brief discussion, then, “We will see if we can learn anything.” To Jeffrey, he asked, “Where do you stay?”

  “A small guesthouse off the Nevsky Prospekt, near Kirpichny.”

  “Run by the Ukrainians, yes? It is nice?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “And if you happen to find a missing American lady while you’re looking,” the Consul General added, “I’d sure appreciate hearing about it.”

  The young man stood and motioned toward the door. “We’ll be in touch.”

  As they passed through the entrance, the Consul General drew the young man over to one side. Jeffrey took the opportunity to tell Casey, “It looks like I’ve misjudged you.”

  Casey shrugged it off, his eyes on his boss. “It happens.”

  “I think I owe you an apology.”

  “Takes a good man to be willing to change his mind.” Casey turned toward him and stuck out his hand. “Pals?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  “Just be sure and watch your back. If the Tombeks or any other of the Chechen clans are involved here, the stakes are high. Winner takes all.”

  Chapter 28

  On Monday morning, Ivona stepped into the guesthouse’s cramped parlor. She spotted Jeffrey Sinclair seated in the corner waiting for her, but she hesitated before approaching him. Somehow, for reasons she could not yet understand, everything about the young American was a challenge to her, a threat. Even before she had first met him, she had feared the meeting.

  It was here again now, this challenge. He sat in a quiet corner of the crowded lobby, the jangling noise and the milling people touching him not at all. Amidst this clamor, the young man sat quiet and still. His attention was focused on the small book in his lap. His entire being was drawn into the act of reading.

  As she stood just inside the entrance and watched him, once again the unbidden memories arose to add to her disquiet.

  * * *

  Her family was given transport passes to leave Archangelsk, but that did not mean they could leave the frozen north. Not yet. First they had to obtain train tickets. The very same night the passes were handed out, her parents sold whatever they did not need to wear or eat or drink. The next morning, they all went together to the station. And there they found a scene straight from hell.

  Thousands of people fought and screamed and wept and pleaded for seats on the one train leaving for the outside that week. There was much fear that the policy would be overturned before the next train arrived, and so everyone fought for a ticket. Somehow her father managed to battle his way through the crowd and buy seats.

  The train trip to the southwest of Russia, to near Kiev, lasted three weeks. Fifteen people and all their belongings were crammed together into a compartment meant fo
r six. Three of these were men from the gold mines of Vorkuta, a place so awful that Ivona’s parents refused to speak of it around her. They looked like walking skeletons, these men. Two did not survive the journey.

  For Ivona, time simply ceased to exist. She sat and she lay and she watched the same endless landscape of mud and trees and primitive villages move slowly by. She sank into a feverish, half-awake state and came to see the train as a new prison, one from which they would never escape. They were destined to drift for the rest of their lives, with no money and little food, on tracks that led nowhere.

  And then, finally, they arrived in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. Their long journey came to an end, and the ordeal of beginning a life in a strange new land, with neither family ties nor work nor money nor a place to live, began. As Ivona struggled to disown the past and put down roots in new rocky soil, she learned the lessons of self-discipline and determined concentration and fierce independence. And the seed of love within her heart remained stillborn.

  ****

  Jeffrey was seldom able to lose himself in the Scriptures. Most days the words remained silent upon the page. He had sometimes come upon Katya during her times of prayer and felt the silence and power that surrounded her. The intensity of her stillness humbled him and mirrored the tenuous hold he felt he held upon his own faith.

  This morning he was forced to do his morning study while seated in the lobby, waiting for Ivona to arrive. He had awakened late and rushed through breakfast, only to realize he had forgotten to pray. So back he went for his Bible and, ignoring the people and the noise surrounding him, he sat down and bent over the Book.

  He prayed silently, his eyes open yet not seeing the page, the words a tumble in his mind. He then focused upon the verses there before him, struggling hard to hold on to this fragment of daily spiritual discipline. Although he was unable to admit it even to Katya, these moments were the anchors that reminded him of just how important faith was to him. He saw these brief periods as a much-needed expression of belief in a world that granted little room for anything of the Spirit.

  But today, without warning, his inner world changed. Somehow, surrounded by the cramped parlor’s noisy clatter, he felt an enveloping peace. The same thing had happened once or twice on his trip through the Ukraine. Why this sense of gathering calm would appear in the midst of such chaos, he could not say. He just knew a sense of being utterly protected, separated from all the world by a divine sea.

  He read and reread the passage, searching for something that would tell him why here, why now, why today. He found nothing.

  So he let the moment go and drifted back across the sea of silence to join with the world once again.

  ****

  Ivona circled the lobby so as to come up from beside and behind. She looked down, and saw that it was the same Bible the American had carried with him throughout the Ukraine. She couldn’t escape the fact that he was encircled by an immense stillness. It called to her. It touched deep. It left her troubled.

  All her life she had heard the tales of holy men and women who through great trials and sacrifices had approached God. Yet here was a young man, coddled by the West, his face as smooth and unlined as a newborn babe. He followed no tradition that she could see. He practiced no ritual. He bore no marks of suffering. How was it then that even in the act of reading he knew the stillness of abiding prayer?

  Jeffrey stirred, straightened, and shifted the muscles of his shoulders. With a guilty start Ivona stepped into view.

  Jeffrey was instantly on his feet. “Good morning. I’m sorry, I didn’t see—”

  “We must hurry,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. “Yussef is expecting us.”

  ****

  The apartment where Yussef waited was located off a side street near the hotel. It was reached by passing through a long tunnel lined with the rotting blankets and newspaper padding of several homeless people. Wires sprouted from rusting fuse boxes to run in slack confusion overhead. The passage opened into a courtyard, which led to another courtyard and after that to another and then another still. All were surrounded by faceless apartment buildings and lined with dead grass and a few stunted trees. Jeffrey followed Ivona up a set of crumbling stairs. She stopped and spoke to a bloated middle-aged man who occupied a glass-enclosed room; the man waved her on without turning from his flickering television.

  In contrast to Ivona’s silent resentment, Yussef appeared genuinely glad to see him. He clapped Jeffrey on the shoulder as they entered, led him toward a trio of threadbare settees, and asked through Ivona, “You have had a successful trip?”

  “Very,” he replied. “Yesterday afternoon I completed the preliminary work. Now I have to make the presentation and have my client complete all these forms and give me a figure for the formal bid.”

  “And you leave today?”

  “In,” Jeffrey glanced at his watch, felt an electric thrill at what awaited him, “about three hours.”

  “We have no right to ask,” Yussef said delicately, “but your presence here is our best possible cover.”

  “I can’t say for certain when I will be back,” Jeffrey replied, understanding perfectly. “I will have to discuss it with my boss and my wife.”

  Yussef grinned at the translation. “There is a difference between the two?”

  “Maybe not,” Jeffrey agreed. “I will explain the situation to them, though, and try to be back before the end of the week.”

  “The sooner the better,” Yussef said. “We can only stay so long here without you.”

  “You really think there is so much danger?”

  “The more I learn,” Yussef replied seriously, “the more certain I become of that.”

  “You haven’t found anything, I take it.”

  “Nothing definite. Only trails.” He pushed the gloom aside, and went on, “Ivona has told you that I came here to visit my fellow countrymen and ask if they had anything to sell. At least, that is what everyone is hearing.”

  “Are you sure we should be talking about it openly?” Jeffrey warned.

  “Here we are safe,” Yussef stated flatly. “Within these doors you may rest easy.”

  “That’s good to know,” Jeffrey said doubtfully.

  Yussef watched him with evident humor. “You are learning the lesson of distrust, yes? We’ll make a Russian of you yet.”

  Gingerly he lifted a heavy, wrapped object from his carryall and set it on the table, then swept aside the covering with a flourish. “Tell me what you think.”

  The object’s beauty as well as its surprise appearance caused Jeffrey’s heart to stutter. The coupe en cristal was a sixteenth-century drinking basin that usually served a decorative purpose. The goblet, fourteen inches long and ten high, was carved from one solid piece of rock-crystal. The face elegantly concealed the stone’s single flaw by incorporating the milky-white vein into a bull’s head. The horns bore intricate crystal floral wreaths and were sturdy enough to be used as handles. The base was of solid silver, delicately carved as a series of matching wreaths, and the center of each held a ruby the size of Jeffrey’s thumbnail.

  “This is fantastic,” Jeffrey murmured.

  “There is more,” Yussef announced, enjoying himself immensely. A smaller package was produced, the wrappings unfolded. “In the company of wolves, a hungry man needs to find those he can trust. The bishop’s word has opened many doors for us here.”

  Jeffrey scarcely heard him. The cigarette case had a facing of a sunray pink enamel usually referred to as guilloché. On this background, intricate work had been done en plein, which meant different colored enamels had been applied in such a refined manner as to appear like carved gemstone. Along the sides was a chasing of white gold, swirling in a complicated union at the catch, which was set with a large, rose-colored diamond. Jeffrey thumbed the clasp, found a scrolled interior of quatrecouleur, or blue-tinted metal formed by combining gold with copper, steel filings, and arsenic. It was signed in fashionable French h
and plate by Court Jeweller Carl Blanc, Saint Petersburg, and dated 1899.

  “Now, one last item,” Yussef announced, playing the conjurer a final time, “at least for now.”

  The ebony-backed case was the size of a book. Within was an early Limoges ceramic altar of the kind used in private chapels or as adornment in the houses of wealthy believers and dating from the early fifteenth century. The interior scenes were startlingly vivid, the colors made by pounding jewels and semiprecious stones to dust and mixing them with resin. The picture frames were of solid silver.

  After the business was concluded, Jeffrey watched with pained reluctance as Yussef rewrapped the items and made them disappear once again. “You’ll have plenty of time to enjoy them in the West,” he said through Ivona.

  Jeffrey nodded, offered, “I’ve been trying to help you with your search for your church treasures. I haven’t accomplished very much, but I’ve done what I can.”

  “For this we are grateful,” Yussef replied, his eyes on a downcast Ivona. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”

  All lightheartedness vanished as Jeffrey described his contacts with the Consul General. With his description of the Orthodox priest, Yussef’s face became an immobile mask. By the time he had completed describing the meetings with the KGB organized crime squad, the atmosphere had turned frigid.

  “You are taking risks,” Yussef muttered. “Such risks you cannot understand.”

  “I think it was correct,” Jeffrey said stolidly. “Each step felt correct at the time, and still feels right. By the way, have you ever heard the name Tombek before?”

  After the translation, Yussef and Ivona exchanged glances, then, “The name means nothing. Why do you ask?”

  “They are a gang. Part of a tribe called Chechen from a region in southern Russia. I was told they were following me the other day.”

  “Again, why?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out,” Jeffrey replied. He related what had happened at the winter palace. “All I can say is, from the looks of things I’m doing what you and the bishop wanted. The attention is on me, not you.”