by David Duffy
How my parents reconnected in Kolyma in 1952 is another mystery I’m trying to solve. Maybe they didn’t—there are other, less savory explanations for how I came into being—but I’ve been told by three women who knew her that he came to Kolyma that year and they were reunited, however briefly. I also know they wrote each other constantly and a few letters got through. I also know because when I was born, she named me after him. Thanks, Mom.
When Stalin finally died, everybody owned up, at least for a time, to what a disastrous experiment the Gulag had been. Beria made a play for the premiership, but Khrushchev, Molotov, and others on the Politburo stopped that. He was arrested and shot later in 1953, but in one of his last acts, he began emptying the camps. His first amnesty, declared only a few weeks after Stalin’s death, included prisoners with less than five-year sentences, pregnant women, women with children, and prisoners under age eighteen. We totaled more than one million people.
It was one thing to be released, another to get home, especially when home was five thousand frozen miles away. Kolyma is a thousand miles north of Vladivostok, a region that the words frigid, barren, and isolated do not begin to describe. I’ve been back as an adult, and I cannot believe that anyone survived there. It’s said that the permafrost still gives up an occasional corpse, even today.
The only transport was Gulag stolypinski, rail cars refitted for prisoners, which meant gutted to hold as many zeks as could be squeezed in. My mother didn’t make it. This is the irony that breaks my heart whenever I think about it. She spent all but a few years of her adult life in concentration camps, somehow keeping starvation, disease, rape, and worse at bay, but she was too weak to make the final journey home. Pneumonia took her somewhere in the Urals.
I flipped through the pages in Sasha’s file. Letters, in her hand, stretching from 1937 to 1953, including her two terms in the Gulag, 1937–46 and 1948–53. They were what I’d been planning to go to Moscow to pick up before the Mulhollands intervened. “Your mother had a cousin who kept every letter she received from her,” Sasha e-mailed me. “22! A stroke of luck—I found them in the cousin’s file.” That Sasha had discovered them was miraculous, but no more so than her finding the means to write in the first place—or that the letters had reached their recipient. Prisoners went to great lengths to record life in the camps and to communicate with those outside, and written records do remain, but not that many.
I skipped though the stack of paper, looking for letters from 1952–53, the time of my birth. Somewhere, I hoped against hope, she might have mentioned my father. A note in a different hand, shaky script drawn by heavy black marker, stopped me cold.
I KEPT THIS ONE, SHIT-SUCKER. MORE TOO. THEY MAKE GOOD READING, IF YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT A SHIT-SUCKING ZEK. THE OUTCOME OF THIS POINTLESS STORY SURPRISED EVEN ME. YOU’LL GET A KICK OUT OF IT. IF YOU LIVE TO SEE IT.
Lachko. I thumbed through the pages. The same message had been inserted in place of a half-dozen letters. I had the feeling they all mentioned my father. Lachko had found another way of toying with me.
I turned on my computer and began the laborious process of entering dates, names, and places. I got halfway through the correspondence, but my mind kept going back to that first letter. I couldn’t shake the image of the girl and her mother in the cold new snow, watching her red-haired father being led to his execution.
I can remember each of the times in my life when I’ve cried. At fourteen, when I was sent back to the Gulag. At thirty-six, when I made the choice that would change everything. A few months later when I saw my son for the last time. Now, two-thirds of a century after the fact, I wept for three people whose suffering ceased long ago. Their fate—no different from that of millions of others—made me wonder whether God should have locked the gates to the Garden of Eden when he had the chance and put an end to his experiment with humanity there and then.
I fell asleep, as I often do on such nights, a hollow feeling in my soul, pondering the unanswerable, while the pillows soaked up my tears.
CHAPTER 21
The Chekist leaned back and closed his eyes. He didn’t need the transferred tape to remember what happened next. It was imprinted on his memory, as permanent and precise as any digital code.
Snow falling heavily as he drove through the birch forest. Three or four inches already on the dirt road. He could see an earlier set of tire tracks, covered by an inch at least. Telling his driver to stop, he knelt in the snow, brushing away the newly fallen flakes with his gloved hand. Outbound tread. Someone had left since he started here ninety minutes ago. Was he too late?
He told the driver to move on. He’d chosen the man just for this job. He knew what to do when they got there.
The headlights of the limousine swept the buildings in the clearing—caretaker’s cottage, barn, main house—illuminating their silhouettes in the snowfall. Two Mercedeses parked on the side. He recognized them as Gorbenko’s and Kosokov’s. Polina’s BMW was nowhere in sight. Hers was the tread on the road.
A rectangle of light framed the caretaker as he came out his door, waving in greeting and bending forward, sludging through the wind. The driver leaned across the roof of the car, waiting until the man came close. The caretaker fell backward as the driver shot him, the crack of his pistol muffled by the snow. The driver was halfway to the door of the cottage before the man hit the ground.
The front door to the house was unlocked. The Chekist didn’t stop to shake the snow from his suit but turned left toward the study. That’s where he’d be. That’s where he was, pulling files from a desk drawer.
“I warned you, Anatoly Andreivich,” he said.
“Whaaaa!” Kosokov dropped a pile of papers and turned.
“Who were you expecting?”
“I … I…”
“The Cheka knows. The Cheka always knows. Where’s Gorbenko?”
“He … I…”
The Chekist hit Kosokov in the side of the face with his automatic. Blood spurted from the banker’s nose. “Where’s Gorbenko?”
“He’s … dead.”
“Dead? How?”
“Polina…”
That didn’t surprise him. Chivalrous to the last. “God knows what she ever saw in you,” the Chekist said. “Just a small greedy coward. Where is she?”
“Not here.”
“I can see that, you fool. Where?” He raised his gun hand to swing at the banker again.
“Stop! She … She went back to Moscow.”
“Coming back?”
“No.”
“Bullshit.” With one eye and the gun on Kosokov, the Chekist searched the room. The CDs Kosokov had told Polina about weren’t there. “Let’s go,” he said.
“No! I—”
The Chekist hit him again. “Show me Gorbenko.” He pushed him to the door and grabbed the half-full vodka bottle on the way out.
The driver was waiting. The Chekist told him to search the house and put the banker’s computer and files in the car. Then he followed Kosokov to the barn. The lights were on. The Chekist felt more than saw movement from the right, near a row of horse stalls. When he turned there was nothing there. Probably just a rat. Kosokov led him across the big empty floor to a trapdoor in the back. Cement stairs led down into the hole. An old bomb shelter. The Chekist shone his flashlight through the hatch. The beam caught Gorbenko’s lifeless eyes staring up at him from eight feet below. A perfectly serviceable grave.
“Have a drink, Anatoly.” He held out the bottle.
Kosokov shook his head.
“I said, have a drink.” He raised his gun hand.
Kosokov cowered and put the bottle to his lips.
“That’s better,” said the Chekist. “Have another.”
Kosokov did as he was told.
“Good,” said the Chekist. “Now, tell me where you hid the CDs.”
CHAPTER 22
I was moving more slowly than usual at 6:00 A.M., thanks to the vodka that helped ease last night’s pain. Mornings after ev
enings with Anna are often like that.
It had rained again overnight, and I ran through the warm, wet streets, thinking about my mother and grandfather, Polina, Lachko, and Ratko Risly. By the time I got home I was wishing I’d stayed in bed.
I brought up Ibansk.com while I drank my coffee.
HAS RATKO BEEN BADGER HUNTING?
The increasingly secretive, but still globe-trotting, Ratko Risly has been spotted, back in his home base of New York—in strange circumstances. Ivanov’s international network reports Risly was seen just Wednesday with none other than Papa Badger, Iakov Barsukov, father of gangsters and architect of the resurrection of the modern-day Cheka. The meeting resulted in Iakov recuperating in a Manhattan hospital from a bullet wound in the chest. And Ratko? Ibanskians won’t be surprised that no one has heard from him. Ivanov wonders if anyone will, ever again.
Unless I missed my guess, my new friend Petrovin had a direct line to Ivanov. I wondered which one was jumping to conclusions, albeit correct conclusions. More immediately, I wondered whether Lachko and his father were reading Ibansk this morning.
* * *
“Ratko’s computer’s online,” Foos said when I stopped by his door a half hour later. “Did its self-wake-up–e-mail–data-processing–more-e-mail thing again this morning. Its new owner also did a full data recovery to see what he’s got. He found the two files that were removed, just like I did.”
“Uh-huh.” No doubt now a clock was ticking somewhere in Lachko’s fake palace. I went to the kitchen to get coffee. Pig Pen called as I passed his office.
“Lucky Russky?”
“Don’t know yet, Pig Pen.”
“Crap shoot. Seven?”
“Later. Maybe.”
“Cheapskate.”
“Don’t give up hope.”
“Cheapskate.”
I took my coffee and the hard drive with Eva’s computer contents back to Foos’s office.
“What’ve you got this time?” he asked.
“Eva Mulholland’s computer. She did a runner from the hospital yesterday. Went straight home, logged on to UnderTable, bought a bunch of ID info, and split.”
“Kid’s got an UnderTable account?”
“I’m guessing she’s using Ratko’s. By the way, all those spreadsheets on Ratko’s computer—seems he’s running a money laundry.”
“I figured that.”
“How the hell—”
“Has to be. Numbers tell stories, just like words. You give the computer to Barsukov?”
“Yeah. His father.”
“Good work. You delivered maybe the best money laundry in history back to the Russian mob. That lady prosecutor should toss your ass in the hoosegow.”
“She would, if she knew. I had my reasons. It was Barsukov’s anyway.”
“Oh. That’s okay, then.”
“You know how it works?”
“Pretty good idea.” He leaned back in his chair, which was hardly big enough to hold his bulk, and put his feet on the desk. He was warming up for one of his professorial lectures on the way the world functions—which, of course, only he understands. Once he gets up a head of steam, he’s hard to stop. On the other hand, he’s rarely wrong. I hoped this would be short.
“Got to thinking yesterday. What would require all those transactions, hundreds every day? I went back to the data. Looks like Rislyakov wrote a program that moves money from overseas banks into U.S. accounts, or from the U.S. banks overseas, every morning, in amounts below the reporting requirements. Before you can say wash and dry, the dough is moved again, in smaller amounts, small enough not to attract attention into new accounts—eight hundred fifty, nine hundred bucks a pop. People go around and withdraw equally small amounts in cash from ATMs and redeposit the bread into other accounts and voilà, clean cash. No trail.”
“That takes a ton of accounts—thousands, more.”
“Sure. Remember all those Social Security numbers he ripped off from T.J. Maxx—maybe a hundred million, right? Not worth jack on the market. Competition’s killed identity theft. Check UnderTable—prices are in the crapper. But put a new name with an existing Social Security number, open a bank account, and you’ve got an untraceable vehicle to move money through. The perfect washing machine. Automate the process and a computer drives the whole thing—orders the electronic transfers and sends out e-mails with instructions for the cash transfers. You recruit the labor and sit back and watch the money move. Even if a courier gets busted, or a bank’s security catches on, the accounts are pure fiction. Nothing to trace. Only a few hundred bucks in them at any given time. The potential loss is next to nothing.”
“Need a lot of people working ATMs.”
“True—but one guy can hit what, six an hour, doing five transactions each. That’s two hundred forty transactions in an eight-hour day. Say the average transfer is eight hundred bucks. Hundred ninety thousand dollars a day. One guy. Hundred guys—nineteen million two. Charge five percent, seven, maybe. Move three, four hundred mil a month. You do the math. Gotta hand it to him. Fucking brilliant.”
“Except he’s dead.”
He shrugged. “So Barsukov doesn’t run one of the hundred best companies to work for. Still a great scheme.”
“Can Barsukov run it without Ratko?”
“It’s automated. The computer’s the main thing. Barsukov’s got that, thanks again to you. It’ll run for a while on its own, but sooner or later, he’s gonna need two pieces that he’s missing.”
“The database—to create new accounts.”
“Very astute. And the code. There’s one piece of the app that’s missing, the one that turns all those numbers into transaction records. I’m assuming that’s one of the files Ratko removed—for security. It’s the right size. The way these things work—”
I held up my free hand. “This is all still guesswork, right?”
“Theory of relativity started out as guesswork.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Einstein. I suppose it’s my job to come up with the empirical proof.”
“You’re the one who wants to impress the hot U.S. attorney.”
“Yeah. Right now, though, I’ve got to find the girl. Promised her father, which was probably a mistake.”
“Given your recent track record and her old man, I’d agree.”
I could’ve thrown my coffee, but he had a point. “I need a list of calls to and from a cell phone. It’s a disposable.” I gave him Petrovin’s number.
“Anybody we know?”
I shook my head. “Russian mystery cop. Working with the hot U.S. attorney. Knows too damned much about me. I need to level the playing field.”
“On it.”
I brought up Eva’s computer and backtracked through her transactions at UnderTable, one of several Web-based identity exchanges in the Badgers’ criminal empire. Used to be, as Foos said, UnderTable and its sister exchanges, Cardshark and ID Warehouse, turned tidy profits. Identity thieves would put the fruits of their labors up for sale, other kinds of crooks would pay the going rate for credit card, bank account, Social Security, and phone numbers, and the Badgers would take a cut of every transaction—eBay for bad guys, complete with its own version of PayPal. But as some wise capitalist once observed, there hasn’t been a business invented yet whose profitability wasn’t eventually eroded by competition. Over time the going rate has declined from thousands to hundreds to tens of dollars. A few years ago, the forty accounts Eva purchased could’ve cost two hundred grand. She probably got them for ten, not that she cared, since, as I suspected, she used Ratko’s account for payment.
Eva wanted cash, not credit—she bought accounts with bank information and PINs included. If she knew someone who made cards, she could hit a dozen ATMs on the way to her dealer.
I plugged the names and account numbers into the Basilisk. It took a few minutes to troll the financial world before it confirmed my suspicion. Eva had checked into room 604 at the W Hotel on Union Square last night at seven forty-two unde
r the name Elizabeth Long. So far this morning, she’d withdrawn nearly $7,700 from ten accounts at ten different ATMs, eight of which were clustered along lower Second and Third avenues, between Fourth and Fourteenth streets. Lots of young people gravitate toward the East Village, but Second Avenue in the single digits is also the longtime center of Ukrainian New York. I put Eva’s computer aside and opened Ratko’s. The home page for the Slavic Center for Personal Development came up again, as it had yesterday. Its mission was to “further the growth of Slavic communities worldwide” by “facilitating the social, cultural, and financial development of individuals of Slavic descent.” To this end, the center sponsored a wide array of “theoretical and practical programs on all aspects of Slavic life.” The center had offices in the major Slavic capitals, as well as Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and a half-dozen Asian cities. Slavs get around. Or Slav money. Laundered Slav money. New York’s “Slav House” was on Second Avenue between Eighth and Ninth. Multiple reasons for a visit.
Foos called as I passed his office. “That cell phone. Not many incoming calls. Mostly outgoing, to a number in Moscow.”
“And?”
“Basilisk has more trouble overseas. Europeans, including Russians, guard their data. So I used some old-fashioned technology and put the number into Google. Belongs to the Criminal Prosecution Service of the Russian Federation.”
* * *
First stop was the W. I dialed room 604 on the house phone and listened to the electronic ring until it clicked over to voice mail. I took the elevator to six, found her door, and knocked. No answer. She could be asleep. I knocked again—louder. She could be stoned. The Basilisk said she hadn’t checked out, but it wouldn’t know if she had simply split.