Last to Fold

by David Duffy

  For Marcelline,

  who makes everything possible

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Tuesday

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Thursday

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Friday

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Saturday–Sunday

  Chapter 27

  Monday

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Tuesday

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Wednesday

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Thursday

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Monday

  Chapter 48

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  The news broke first on Ibansk.com, as it often does these days, the hyperbolic blog having filled the void left by the Kremlin-controlled media for informative, if overheated, news of the New Russia. They say even Putin reads it—secretly, of course. Citizen Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, the anonymous impresario behind Ibansk, was digging in the Cheka’s graveyard again, a favorite spot of his and a dangerous place to be found with a shovel. No one’s caught on to Ivanov yet, but plenty of people would happily see him buried. I know because I know a lot of them. As I read his latest post, I had the feeling the list just got longer.

  OLIGARCH FOUND?

  Has a final chapter been written in one of Ibansk’s more sordid tales—that’s saying something, no?—the greed-driven life and none-too-early death of one of New Russia’s most notorious oligarchs? Or is this the first entry in a new book of mystery and deceit?

  Anatoly Kosokov. Even longtime denizens of Ibansk will be scratching their heads, pulling at the cords of memory. Kosokov? Who the hell, pray tell, is Kosokov? Abramovich, Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky—sure, all well-known names, although two live in London, one in Tel Aviv, and one in solitary confinement in Siberia. But Kosokov?

  Ivanov asks, how soon we forget? Patience. He will explain all.

  Kosokov wasn’t as flamboyant as his fellow thieves. He didn’t buy yachts, estates in England or France, or football clubs. Still, he was just as ruthless and made himself almost as rich—until the end.

  An accountant by training, Kosokov worked in the vast aparat of the Soviet Finance Ministry. His sister married one of Yeltsin’s chief aides. Sounding more familiar? In the early years of transition, he acquired a series of banks and built them into Rosnobank, Russia’s third largest. He was worth billions. Then came the financial crisis of 1998, the collapse of the GKOs (an Ibanskian version of a financial guarantee if there ever was one), and the devaluation of the ruble. Fortunes evaporated overnight, including Kosokov’s. Or did it?

  I remembered Kosokov. A short, coarse, ambitious man, too sure of himself by half. He made a point of telling you how well he knew everyone from Yeltsin on down. Exactly the kind of guy to make a killing in Russia’s train-wreck transition to capitalism. He wasn’t one of us—us being the Cheka, Lenin’s original and still my preferred name for the ChK/GPU/OGPU/KVD/NKVD/MVD/MGB/KGB/SVR/FKB/FSB. Most know it as the KGB, or today’s acronym, FSB. The secret police by any label you choose.

  Kosokov was always around, acting as if he belonged. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it seemed odd, looking back. The Cheka has always taken care of itself first, and we were under attack from all sides back then, following the failed Gorbachev coup and the collapse of the Party. Kosokov was one who argued loud and long for putting us out of business. Our paths might have become intertwined later on, but I was long gone by then, and he, of course, had disappeared. Or had he?

  I went back to Ibansk.com.

  Rosnobank didn’t fail until a year later, October 1999. Rumors abounded—embezzlement, money laundering, financing ties to Chechen terrorists. The answers went up in smoke—literally, along with the depositors’ funds—in a spectacular fire that gutted the headquarters tower in central Moscow. Arson, certainly, but as with so many such investigations in Ibansk, the perpetrators were never found, even though this was without doubt a sophisticated crime involving much preparation and many hands. Nine dead, the life savings of millions—gone. Depositors queued for weeks to find they had nothing left. But this is Ibansk—who gives a damn about them?

  The authorities went looking for Kosokov, although just what they planned to do if they found him is still a question. The case foundered, and in due course fell onto the slag heap of forgotten offenses.

  Until now. A charred corpse has been unearthed—a decade old!—in an old Soviet shelter beneath the burned-out barn at Kosokov’s dacha in the Valdai Hills. And Ivanov is told—sssshhhhh!—in strictest confidence, by sources too well placed not to know, that DNA tests will prove it to be the body of Anatoly Kosokov.

  Ivanov will neither waste bandwidth nor insult intelligence by listing the myriad questions this discovery raises. He will, however, go looking for answers. Keep your browsers open to Ibansk. Ivanov is on the case!

  Even as an ex-Chekist, I don’t try to defend the Soviet system. I lived it on all sides, experienced everything it could inflict, for forty years. I still have the scars. I moved to New York to get away from my past and to keep some distance from the cauldron of Wild West capitalism, pseudo-democracy, and Cheka control we now refer to as the New Russia. Ivanov’s more direct. He calls it Ibansk, which translates roughly as Fucktown. Making a clean break is never easy, though, especially in this global age, even forty-seven hundred miles and an ocean away.

  We have a saying in Russia. If a pig comes to your table, he will put his feet on it. Trouble is, no one tells you how to spot the pig.

  CHAPTER 2

  I found a parking place, legit, on East Eighty-third, just off Fifth. Good till eleven thirty, when the street cleaners come, but I expected to be on my way by then.

  I’d driven uptown, Ivanov’s florid prose filling my head. He takes great pleasure in it, but it’s a far cry from the hard, flat, biting satire of the original Soviet-era creator of Ivanov and Ibansk, Alexander Zinoviev. He was a master wordsmith. Fucktown was his moniker then, when it was even more apt.

  My destination was two blocks south, and that’s all it took to work up a sweat. We were entering the second week of a mid-June heat wave. The thermometer hadn’t seen the seventies in six days. Not the dry heat of Chandler’s Santa Anas, the kind that made meek wives thumb carving knives while eying their husbands’ necks. This was heavy, soaking New York heat. The air clung to your body like a wet black garbage bag, and everybody on the street looked like he carried a meat-ax. Yesterday topped out at ninety-nine, and Con Ed blew a transformer. Most of Midtown lost power. Office buildings emptied, and bars swelled—the former had lost air-conditioning, but the latter still had ice. The
city seemed evenly divided between those fuming at the disruption and those determined to turn calamity into a good time. I had one foot in each camp.

  The aftereffects were still being felt this morning, including on the subway, which was one reason I drove uptown. I enjoy heat, most of the time. Where I grew up, there was precious little of it. Even so, like everyone else, I was hoping this would end soon.

  The weather wasn’t the only thing aggravating New York. A credit crunch, not too different from the one that wiped out Kosokov, was jerking the financial markets around like a sadist with a dog on a leash. The previous week, on Wednesday, the stock market dived three hundred points. On Thursday it lost another two twenty. It tried to rally Friday morning, before the bottom fell out and the Dow lost five percent. Yesterday was a shaky day, but flat, a relief to everyone. Nobody was predicting what would happen next. I keep a little money in the market, but I’m enough of a Marxist not to bet too much on the cornerstone of capitalism. Like Chekhov said, when you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around you. That’s a minority point of view in this town.

  I was early, so I crossed the street to get a better look at 998 Fifth Avenue from the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum. Twelve stories of Italian Renaissance–style limestone evoked wealth and solidity—a lot of wealth and solidity. The building’s exterior was newly cleaned, and the stone shone bright white. Panels of green and gold marble, set into the walls at the eighth and twelfth floors, sparkled. One of the first apartment buildings that was designed to coax New York’s wealthy out of their town houses into a uniquely American residential experiment—communal living for millionaires. The facade reminded me, as the stolid prewar co-ops on Fifth and Park often do, of the massive Stalinist apartment blocks that line several of Moscow’s main boulevards. They have the same solidity, the same anonymity, the same imposing mass, the same we’ll-be-here-long-after-you’re-gone attitude. Not that astonishing, given that many were built around the same time. The Moscow buildings, however, were constructed for a completely different kind of communal living, every room jammed with multiple families. No workingmen (other than servants) ever lived at 998 Fifth, and the men who did were unlikely to appreciate the comparison.

  I knew from the real estate columns that apartments in buildings like this rarely came on the market, and when they did, the prices ran into tens of millions. A broker I’d dated once told me, with more than a little breathless reverence, you needed three times the purchase price in liquid assets—stocks, bonds, cash—before the co-op boards that ruled these residential fiefs would even think of letting you in the door. The ratio was even higher in “the best” buildings. That relationship didn’t last, probably because she figured out I wasn’t Avenue material. The man I was going to see, Rory P. Mulholland, had no problem making the cut—or hadn’t when he bought the apartment. Today, if the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post were to be believed, he was feeling the pinch.

  I pictured Mulholland as an American Kosokov—plump, arrogant, imperious. The little research I’d done supported that impression. A second-generation Irish immigrant, he’d also made his fortune as a banker, turning a sleepy New England credit union into America’s sixth-largest lender, mainly by catering to people with credit ratings others wouldn’t touch. FirstTrustBank was the country’s most aggressive marketer of credit cards and a major player in the subprime mortgage market. Mulholland preyed on the poor, charging a healthy premium for providing them access to credit the rest of us take for granted. He was the kind of man Marx blamed for the world’s problems. Lenin would have had him arrested, Stalin—shot. Now maybe the markets were going to mete out their own brand of punishment. It was becoming more and more clear that Mulholland had borrowed long and lent short, which even an ex-socialist knows is a form of Russian roulette. Wall Street sharks, sensing one of their own wounded in the water, were circling. FTB’s stock had almost halved since Wednesday.

  I didn’t expect to like Mulholland much, I’d already told Bernie that, and I was ninety percent sure I didn’t want to work for him. I also had business in Moscow I was eager to attend to, a big breakthrough in a decade-long project. Bernie asked me to meet with him at least, and Bernie and I go way back, to the days when he was on one side and I was on the other. He’s also my best source of business. One reason being he has much higher tolerance for self-important men like Mulholland than I do.

  I took a deep breath and started to cross the street. I stopped, choking on wet air caught in my throat. Three identical SUVs, windows tinted black, paraded down Fifth Avenue and halted, double-parked at the corner. Police vehicles of some kind. I waited, but no one got out. Probably part of a motorcade, getting ready to form. Plenty of diplomats and dignitaries in this part of town. I continued across and approached the entrance of the building under a heavy iron awning. The door opened before I got there. The limestone lobby was cool and dark, a welcome change from the sidewalk. A uniformed doorman looked me up and down without giving any indication of the impression formed. I said I was there to see Mr. Mulholland. The doorman looked over to another uniformed man behind a desk, who lifted a receiver.

  “Who shall I say is here?”

  I told him. He punched a button, waited, said, “Mr. Turbo,” into the receiver, hung up, and nodded toward the elevator in the back. Yet another man in uniform drove silently to the ninth floor. Expensive place to live at Christmas.

  The elevator man pulled back the gate. I stepped out of the walnut cab into a small vestibule. A pair of mahogany double doors opened before I could knock. A man in a dark suit, white shirt, and silver tie gestured that I should enter.

  “Wait here, please.”

  He left me in an entrance hall that would not have been out of place in an English manor house. No windows, a half-dozen doors, and a large curved staircase in one corner ascending to the heavens. Plenty of pictures, all Old Masters, some better than others, biblical themes. I was trying to divine the message an arrow-riddled St. Sebastian conveyed to arriving guests when the man in the silver tie returned.

  “This way, please.”

  He led me to a door at the far end of the hall, knocked once, and stood aside. I went in.

  The room was dark and cool, like the lobby. No light from the windows, only lamps. Geography said we were on the side of the building overlooking Central Park, where most people would want to show off the view, but the curtains were drawn. Too bad—sunlight was a short-lived visitor where I come from and never to be shut out entirely, even in a heat wave. Another manor house room, double height, paneled, bookshelves all around, with what looked to be a family crest plastered onto the vaulted ceiling. An outsized marble fireplace took up one end, counterbalanced by an enormous partners’ desk at the other. The desktop was clean except for two computer flat-screens. Over the fireplace was a large Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. Early Italian Renaissance, unless I missed my guess. Mary was lovely, but I’ve never gotten used to the adult features Renaissance painters give the baby Jesus. A carved balustrade circumnavigated the bookshelves at the second level. The books were leather bound, and some looked as though they’d actually been read, but not, I was willing to wager, by their current owner.

  Two men rose from chairs by the fireplace. Bernie Kordlite came across an acre of Oriental carpet, hand outstretched, smiling. He was medium height, five-ten, two inches shorter than I am. In his sixties, he was losing the baldness battle and showing some paunch. He had a round face, wide mouth, and small nose, on which was perched a pair of circular horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a three-button sack suit and striped tie. Bernie is perpetually dressed in a three-button sack suit and striped tie. I’ve always wanted to ask Barbara, his wife, if that’s what he sleeps in.

  “Hello, Turbo,” Bernie said, grabbing my hand. “Thanks for coming uptown. Let me introduce Rory Mulholland. Rory, this is Turbo Vlost.”

  Mulholland stood by his chair, waiting for me to come to him. I thought about standi
ng my ground, too, forcing him to take the first step, but I’d come here because Bernie asked me to, and it was pointless to pick a fight, especially a petty one, as soon as I walked through the door. I was tempted though.

  “How do you do, Mr. Vlost,” Mulholland said.

  I took his hand. Fleshy, his grip neither firm nor limp.

  “Call me Turbo.”

  He didn’t say, Call me Rory. He sat and gave me the once-over, not intently, but as if he were vaguely curious how someone like me came to be in his library. His face was as expressionless as the doorman’s downstairs.

  Mulholland wore a suit as well, but his was tailored. Double-breasted, dark gray with a heavy white stripe that stated without question Savile Row. His white shirt had a blue RPM monogram on the French cuff. Woven blue and gold silk tie that probably cost more than my car. Tied in a Windsor knot. I’ve never trusted men who use Windsor knots. The entire Brezhnev Politburo wore them, and they were all hard-asses. I shouldn’t talk—I haven’t worn a tie in years.

  Mulholland was shorter than I expected—about five foot eight—and rounder, too. He looked younger than his sixty-eight years. His dark curly hair was still full—no gray. His face was without wrinkles, his complexion Irish-pale with round red cheeks—an aging Pillsbury Doughboy, except for one thing. He had hard, dark eyes behind round tortoiseshell glasses that tried to soften them but didn’t stand a chance. A predator’s eyes. I knew them from the Gulag and the Cheka, and I’ve always made a point of keeping my distance.

  I turned to Bernie with a look in my eyes that said, I want out, but he either didn’t get the message or ignored me. “Sit down, Turbo. Coffee?”

  “No, thanks. Had my fill.”

  “Excuse me a moment,” Mulholland said, walking to the desk at the far end. Just after nine thirty, I had a pretty good idea what he was doing. He pushed a couple of keys on his computer. “Market opened down fifty, we’re down two. Not an auspicious start to the day.” “We” would be FirstTrustBankCorp, of which he owned twelve percent.

  I took off my jacket, probably a breach of etiquette, and sat next to Bernie. I was wearing the same thing I always wear, gray linen jacket, black T-shirt, beige linen trousers. In winter, I substitute leather and flannel for the linen and a turtleneck for the T-shirt. Saves a lot of time in the morning, not thinking about what to wear.