The Great Game

by D. R. Bell

  David lay there wondering about Teddy, whether the vicious little dog had survived this day. He heard a knock and got up to open the door. It was Sasha, who asked David to come to a study with him.

  The study was a large room with a dark wood floor partially covered by a thick Persian rug. Dark paneled walls, two large bookcases, a computer desk, and a few comfortable chairs. Four large portraits hung on the walls, three of stern looking men in suits and ties, one of a smiling woman in an early twentieth century dress. There was a faint smell of cigar smoke. Just like in movies, David thought. Despite the dark interior, the room was full of light from a large French window overlooking a terrace and the Pacific Ocean in the distance.

  An older man was there already, whom Sasha introduced as his uncle Miguel, their host. Maggie and Oleg came in. Maggie wore a patterned blouse and a long green skirt, probably given to her by one of the women in the house. Miguel apologized for getting so quickly to business, but he understood that David and Maggie were in a somewhat dangerous situation, and he wanted to start putting together necessary precautions.

  Maggie said, “We’re still in danger?”

  Oleg took his turn. “You stumbled on something big and dangerous. Both MSS and GRU now think that you know more than you should. You can’t go back to your old lives.”

  David asked, “What do you mean? What other lives can we go back to?”

  “You can change your identity, you can move to another country, you can try to get to the bottom of this if you dare … but you can’t go back. It’s not only you two who are in danger, it’s anyone associated with you.”

  “But what about you, Oleg? Aren’t you in danger, too?”

  Sasha said, “Oleg will go to Mexico. We have a big family with large holdings. We can use Oleg’s skills and loyalty. He will change his identity, of course. And if you want to move to Mexico, we’ll be able to protect you better there as well. But the decision is yours. Regardless of what you choose to do, we should start working on creating new identities for you: passports, driver’s licenses, bank accounts. Please think about it.”

  “Why can’t we go to the FBI?” asked David.

  “You can, but with what? I’m sorry, but neither Oleg nor I are in a position to confirm your story. At worst, you’ll become suspects. At best, they’ll believe you. But you still won’t be able to go back to your lives. They can’t protect you if you do.”

  Miguel got up. “We’ll give you some time to think about it.” Taking his lead, Sasha and Oleg filed out of the room, leaving David and Maggie to themselves.

  David pulled the green cat-eye glasses from his shirt pocket. “I grabbed them when I left Andrei’s house. Forgot to give them to you earlier.”

  Maggie sadly twirled the glasses in her hand. “If Oleg is right, this might be all I have left from my life.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Everything is happening too quickly. I don’t know what to do. What about you? Do you know?”

  David thought for a minute. “Yes, I think I do. I spent the last five days searching for information, and they are right: it’s dangerous to know. But it’s even more dangerous not to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The times I hated most during these days were when I did not know why things were happening. Like why these people were after me. When I knew, I could deal with it, I could strategize. If I go out there and hide, I think one day they will find me. But if I get the information, I will be in control because I can decide when to release it and how.”

  “Well, it didn’t help Trimble …”

  “True, but Trimble made himself vulnerable because he was focused on using information for financial gain, not to protect himself. Did you notice that Petr was concerned about Trimble selling the information to others, not about releasing it? They knew him and they knew he was in it for the money.”

  Maggie crossed her arms on her chest, as if she was cold. “I understand. But it’s dangerous to look. It’s not like you can walk into a library and ask for Schulmann’s research.”

  David said quietly, “Yes. But I have another reason. I want to know. I can’t get Megrano and James and Frank out of my head. I had no choice; Trimble threw me into this without asking me. They chose to get involved despite the danger. I am alive today only because they risked their lives in order to get to the truth. I asked James why he was doing this, he gave two reasons: saving you and desire to find the truth. And I am sure Schulmann knew that his research was dangerous, but he did not stop. I feel I owe it to them to find out.”

  “And what will you do when you find it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I have to see what’s in there.”

  Maggie took a step forward, arms at her sides, looking straight at him. “Why did you come to the lake today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could have disappeared. As a matter of fact, you could have done it earlier, on Sunday, when they grabbed me. You could have just walked away.”

  “You know, the night after they took you I went to James’s house. And he asked me the same question: why won’t you walk away? And I told him that I can, but I won’t. I would have felt like the worst lowlife if I did. I thought they were going to kill you unless we tried to do something. I don’t want to go through life feeling like a coward.”

  Maggie continued looking at him intently. “But where would you start searching?”

  “Frank told us that Schulmann had a sister and a niece. The sister lives in Phoenix. I think that’s the place to start.”

  She twirled the glasses again. “Do you really think we’ll find the file?”

  David shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t have many leads, so we may hit the wall quickly.”

  Maggie walked to the window and stood there looking out at the ocean. Thinking out loud, she said, “Those two nights in Malibu, I could hear the ocean but I could not see it. The window shutters were closed. I don’t know why, but not being able to see it was difficult. I am sorry. I really, really don’t know what to do. I wish I could just wake up from this nightmare. I don’t know how. We can try looking for Schulmann’s file, see what happens. Do you mind if we do it together?”

  David inhaled involuntarily, his brain seized by momentary panic. He hadn’t thought this through. What would it mean to “do it together”? He’d have to continue to be responsible for her? But how could he say no? It was simply not possible. David squeezed out, “Yes, sure.”

  Once he said it, it actually felt good. It was the right thing to do. Plus, he needed company. For all his newfound bravado, he would have felt lost on his own.

  Wednesday, 4/27/2022, 6:42 p.m. PDT

  David and Maggie had dinner with Miguel’s large family. In addition to Miguel, Sasha, and Oleg, there were at least a dozen people from three generations. David had no idea what Sasha told them about him, but he clearly had the reputation of a fearless hero. Kids were looking at him in awe, and one of the unattached younger women kept trying to get closer to David by serving him an extra portion or pouring a glass of wine. Maggie, who was sitting next to him, was getting visibly irritated, and at one point snarled at the girl.

  After dinner, Miguel, Sasha, Oleg, Maggie, and David retreated to an already familiar study and shut the door. “So, have you decided on anything?” asked Miguel. David and Maggie said they were going to pursue Schulmann’s investigation and would start in Phoenix, where his relatives may live.

  Miguel shook his head. “This is too dangerous. Don’t get these romantic notions. Go to Mexico or Brazil; live your life.” Oleg said he understood; they wanted to avenge their friends the way he had Alex. David thought it was not only about revenge, but he left it at that.

  Figuring he wouldn’t change their minds, Miguel told Sasha to take them to Javier the next morning, and bid them goodnight.

  “Who is Javier?” Maggie asked.

  Sasha explained. “Javier is an expert in creating new identiti
es for people on the run. He works with our family often; he is good. You need a quality setup, not a cheap back alley driver’s license.”

  They went to sit by the outside fireplace in the yard, drinking from a bottle of one hundred percent agave tequila that Sasha brought. Oleg and Sasha raised their toast to Alex.

  David asked Sasha, “How long have you known Alex?”

  “For about two years, as long as I’ve known Oleg. We became friends. We are in a rough business, and you choose friends carefully. I am no saint and neither was he, but I knew I could trust him.”

  Maggie nodded. “I think even if Alex had had a chance to get away, he would have stayed and defended me. I never approved of the business that Andrei—and you— were in, but I’d say that about him: he was loyal to his friends. They call it “honor amongst thieves” in Russia. Let’s have a drink to Andrei, too.”

  Sasha addressed David. “I’m not sure you would understand, since you come from a different world, but there is a difference between people like us and the gangsters that killed your friend Jim. I don’t have clean hands; I’ve killed people. But I never killed anyone I did not have to. I mean … wolves kill when they are hungry, but not otherwise. The people that killed your friend, they didn’t have to do that. But they did not care. They are like mad dogs.”

  “And what about Petr?” asked David.

  “I think he enjoyed killing. I think he killed for the sake of it, whether he had to or not. I don’t know what animal to compare him to. Perhaps a cobra. We have people like that in Mexico. They think they can rise to the top by being ruthless. To us, such people are enemies because the world they try to create is not the world we want to live in.”

  “And your family?”

  “I’d like to believe there is a difference between them and us. We have businesses that are legitimate and businesses that are, as you would call them, not quite kosher. But it’s not all about money or business. My father’s favorite movie is the original Godfather. He probably sees himself as Don Corleone, ruthless but loyal. He wants the next generation of our family to be completely legitimate. He sent me here to study economics at USC. He was not happy that I didn’t want to take a regular job after college.”

  “You graduated from USC?” asked Maggie.

  “Yes, I did. Degree in business administration. Had a couple of offers from financial firms but could not see myself crunching numbers behind a desk. I wanted to run my own business. My education came in handy.”

  Oleg grinned. “Alex and I helped Sasha to learn some of the non-numbers side of business.”

  Sasha smiled in return. “This also came in useful a few times, including this morning.”

  Later, back in his room, David again went through the events of the day: being almost killed twice but saved both times by Oleg, and now staying in the house of a man he’d never met before and planning to change his identity. He felt like he was living in a movie, because that was where things like that happened, not in real life. Exhausted, he climbed into bed, but the thoughts racing through his mind wouldn’t let him sleep.

  Wednesday, 4/27/2022, 10:27 p.m. PDT

  When the house became quiet, the door opened carefully and Maggie snuck into his room. Wearing flower-patterned PJ’s, she sat at edge of the bed and whispered, “I can’t sleep. I’m a ball of nerves. I have to pinch myself to confirm that I’m alive.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  “I am sorry I led you straight to Petr. I had no idea.”

  “They would have found us anyway. Petr knew everything that the MSS knew. I still don’t quite understand how or why.”

  Maggie got up to go, hesitated. “Last Saturday night I left promising to tell you more about myself. We never had a chance after that. Do you still want to hear it?”

  A simple but scary question. Like on a game show: Do you choose the door number one? Or the door number two? Should he admit to being tired in a “no stories tonight” way? What’s behind the other door, where would it lead? Once he starts finding these more intimate details, they may create a bind that will tie them.

  “Yes.”

  She sat back. “Go ahead then, ask.”

  Something safe. “Tell me about your family, your childhood.”

  ”OK. I was born in December of 1989 in Kiev. My parents had given up on ever having kids, so my coming along was a bit of a surprise. They had a large flat close to the center of the city and to Dnieper, the river that dissects Kiev. My father, Eugene, has a PhD in aerospace engineering. He now runs an airplane manufacturing plant. My mother, Maria, taught Russian and Ukrainian literature in Kiev University. She is a great-niece of writer Mikhail Bulgakov. She convinced my dad to name me Margarita, after the heroine of his most famous work. Margarita is not a very common name and my dad wanted to name me Anna, after his grandmother. But my mom won, partly by arguing that they can shorten it to Rita if needed, and partly because wives usually win such arguments. So I grew up being called Rita. I never quite liked the name. Am I boring you silly?”

  Boring is good. “So are you Ukrainian or Russian?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I am a mutt. My mother was half-Ukrainian on her father’s side, and half-Russian on her mother’s side. A number of the relatives on Grandma’s side perished in Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s. Her father had his own scores to settle with the Party, with his parents dying in the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932. He survived only because city relatives took him in. My dad is half-Russian and half-Jewish. His mother, Nellya, escaped Kiev in 1941 at the age sixteen and spent the war in Siberia. When she came back, she found out that her family, the ones that stayed in Kiev, were killed by the Nazis in the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of the city.”

  David gasped. ”Oh my God. My family would complain about things like vacations ruined by lost luggage, not being starved or massacred.”

  It was Maggie’s turn to be surprised. “You didn’t lose anyone in the war?”

  “One of my grandfathers served in the Pacific during the war, but he came back unscathed and the family did not talk about it much. Looks like your family had a hard life there.”

  Maggie gave a slight bitter laugh. ”It was fairly normal by our standards. I think Americans do not realize or appreciate how good you’ve had it all these years. You don’t know the real meaning of fear. When you are scared to say anything, when you avert your eyes at something wrong being done because you are afraid for what will happen to your family. And then you feel so ashamed inside that you avoid looking at people … that kind of fear.”

  David wanted to know more. You are on the other side of the door, might as well keep going. “What was your childhood like?”

  Maggie pushed him to move over and stretched out on the bed next to him. David felt a mixture of excitement and panic.

  She continued. “My parents were both working, and I was raised primarily by my grandmothers and the grandfather on my mom’s side. The other grandfather died before I was born. They despised all kinds of totalitarian or collectivist politics. Grandma Nellya used to tell me, ‘Scoundrels always hide behind big words about common good and send others to work or fight, but they themselves live by different rules. They talk about common sacrifice and how lucky you are to have a small apartment, while they enjoy their spacious homes and expensive vacations.’ And then Grandma Katya would add, ‘And they’ll call on you to march for this cause or that cause, and they’ll tell you how you are less important than some collective need … spit on them and walk away! They don’t own you and you are important because you are you, not because you are a cog in some wheel.’ ”

  “They sound like fans of Ayn Rand.”

  “Kind of. I must admit that such attitudes did not make me particularly popular at school. I was a good student, but I was often alone. The director of the school felt that I was not treating my ‘social responsibilities’ seriously and tried to complain about my ‘anti-social tendencies’ to my parents. My dad by then was a known industrial manage
r not to be pushed around, and the teachers eventually left me alone.”

  David tried to keep his focus on Maggie’s story while acutely feeling the warmth of her body next to his. “Must be hard to be a kid without many friends.”

  “I read a lot. With my mom being a professor of literature, the house was filled with books. She loved literature and tried to pass it on to me. But not just any books. My mom said that bringing a book was like allowing someone into your home, and she was picky about whom she would let in. The bookcases were bulging with works by Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Chekhov, Dreiser, Feuchtwanger, Camus, Fitzgerald. And of course a special place belonged to Mikhail Bulgakov. My mom unashamedly admitted that being a relative, albeit a distant one, had a lot to do with it. But aside from that, The Master and Margarita resonated with her heart, especially the heroine.”

  Maggie fell silent, apparently reminiscing, before she continued. ”When I was growing up, things were changing in the city, not necessarily for the better. There was this excitement of throwing off the communist regime, but then it gave way under mismanaged economic reforms. Up to the north siloviki, the “power guys” of the former KGB, had taken over, installed a president from their ranks. It was like we were being subverted by law and order authoritarians. Things came to a head in 2004 when pro-democracy candidate Yushchenko ran against establishment-and Russia-backed Yanukovich. As allegations of pro-Yanukovich electoral fraud spread, people took to the streets in what became the Orange Revolution. I was fifteen and I felt that at last I had a cause I could believe in. I just threw myself into demonstrations and protests. I camped out for days on Maidan Square. New elections had been called, and Yushchenko won easily. I really think that was the happiest time of my life.”

  “What happened then?”

  ”I finished school and tried to follow my father’s science path in college. My heart wasn’t in it. I dropped out after a year and went to work in a bookstore while trying to find what I wanted to do.”