Last to Fold

by David Duffy

  I listened in my pipe section, glad he could not see my face. I probably could have covered my surprise, but any little tic, he would have spotted it. It wasn’t the lie that shocked. I was prepared for that. It was the indifference with which he told it—and the realization that he’d been doing so for as long as I’d known him. I should have spotted that years ago, had I been looking.

  “You know the rest,” he said. “Bombs in that mall, Buynaksk, Pechatniki, the Kashirskoye Highway. Then Gorbenko got cold feet. He bungled the job in Kapotnya. It didn’t matter by that point. The outcry was everything Patrushev wanted. Even the fuckup in Ryazan—and his foolish statements—couldn’t undermine it.”

  I had a minor epiphany as I switched pipes again. Iakov—the ultimate Cheka puppetmaster—had sent Patrushev out to try to deflect accusations against the Cheka, and he’d done it with a claim of innocence he knew full well would meet with disbelief bordering on incredulity.

  Iakov was still talking. “There were factions within the organization, as always, but we came together, as we do when we’re under attack. No one could prove anything. I thought we were out of the woods. Then Kosokov’s problems started.

  “We’d done business with that bastard for years, since ’92. He was stupid and greedy—easy to manipulate. I never trusted him, though, so we kept watch. Office, apartment, dacha, all wired. That’s how I knew about Polina. We thought he’d weathered the financial storm in ’98, but he’d been adept at hiding his losses. He made the same stupid bets as everyone else. The bank’s balance sheet was in tatters. Only a matter of time until it failed—which would bring in auditors, the Ministry of Finance, that bastard Churnin, and who knows what they’d find?”

  “That’s not true—you knew exactly.”

  “Fair enough. So, yes, we set the fire at Rosnobank Tower. We took care of the backup data center. I figured Kosokov would make a run for it, and we’d get him at the border, which would look good at the trial. I knew Gorbenko would turn anywhere to save his worthless skin, but the one place I didn’t count on was the CPS. They were impotent—not a factor, not even a consideration.”

  Cheka arrogance.

  “I heard Gorbenko at the dacha that day—on the tape. I heard him and Kosokov discussing another set of records. I listened to Polina kill him. She shot him in cold blood, if you don’t know. Kosokov didn’t have the balls to do it himself.”

  “You set the fire?”

  “What?”

  “The fire in the barn. The fire that killed Kosokov. The fire that almost killed Eva.”

  He took a step forward and peered through the night in my direction. His eyes would be adjusting. He was also buying time to think. I moved deeper into the pipe.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to confess to, Turbo? Then I can catch my plane.”

  That’s the way it worked in the old days. The interrogator dictated the confession. The only thing the confessor caught was a bullet—in the back of the skull. “The fire, the barn—you burned Kosokov alive.”

  I couldn’t make out his face, but I sensed worry, maybe even fear, for the first time.

  “I set the fire, yes. I needed the CDs, the bank records he copied. For the Cheka. It never occurred to me he’d die before he talked. I always thought he was a weak man.”

  “And Eva?”

  “I had no idea she was there.”

  “And if you had?”

  “Turbo! What the fuck is the point? Shall I just confess to every supposed crime of every Chekist right now? Will that satisfy you?”

  “Keep going. What happened next?”

  “I followed Polina to her dacha. Just missed her. Maybe we passed on the road. It was snowing hard by then. I went back to Kosokov’s, but travel was slow. She’d come and gone. She slipped through our fingers.

  “She’d put what was left of Kosokov in the shelter with Gorbenko. I left them. Better to have everyone asking what happened to the crooked banker than how the crooked banker got burned to death. Once we had Polina, we could discover the bodies and hang both murders around her neck. I never stopped looking, like I told you, but she covered her tracks well. In my mind, it was still unfinished business, and it looked more and more like it would remain unfinished. I’d almost written it off until one day she called—out of the blue.”

  “She called you? When?”

  “December, just before Christmas.”

  Shit! I was the one who was sloppy. I’d missed that. The Basilisk had served it up, and I’d ignored it. The trips to Hammersmith. She’d gone expressly to make untraceable calls to Iakov. She’d gone straight to the source with her blackmail threat. The one man who had everything to lose from exposure. That’s why she’d been so scared. Lachko she could handle. Iakov—she knew better.

  He said, “She had the file. Kosokov had hidden the CDs in Eva’s stuff. She demanded a hundred million! Polina was never shy.”

  “So the six hundred million you told me she stole, that was another lie.”

  “Polina could never get enough. She was the most venal—”

  “I’ve heard that speech, Iakov. I was married to her for eight years, remember?”

  “If you know so much, why are you asking?”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Rislyakov set up the payment system. He was supposed to find out who and where she was.”

  “Wait a minute. How’d you know about Rislyakov? I thought you and Lachko weren’t talking.”

  “As I asked the other day, what kind of jackass do you take me for?”

  Of course. He had his own man—or men—inside Lachko’s organization.

  “You’re right about Rislyakov’s parents. I didn’t check that, until later, after he disappeared. He was another one—he thought he could outwit the Cheka. Sooner or later, they all learn—you take on the Cheka, you take on the whole organization. Something you might want to bear in mind.”

  “Keep going.”

  “He was clever. Took a couple of months to catch up. We pegged him in Moscow last month, right before he came back here. I took the next flight and went to the place on Greene Street. That’s where you came in.”

  I checked my vest and came out of the pipe. “You shot him, didn’t you?” I said as I came close. “He was going to put the bite on you. You didn’t follow him. He invited you. You gambled that the file was on his computer, or if it wasn’t, no one would find it with him dead. So you killed him as soon as he opened the door.”

  “If I did, where was the gun? And who shot me?”

  “Polina’s husband’s driver. He arrived at just the wrong time. You’d pulled Ratko into the back hall. Left the door open. He came in after, saw the blood, just like I did. He surprised you, you shot at him, missed, he shot you. He was taking your gun when Eva fired through the door and hit him. They exchanged blind fire, and he left while he still could. You passed out until, as you say, I came in.”

  “That’s a fanciful story.”

  I was a few feet away. He looked old. He looked tired. The blue eyes still burned defiant.

  “You shot Ratko, yes or no?”

  “If it makes you happy, yes. Cheka honor was at stake. The only person who will truly miss him is Lachko. That should make you happy.”

  Lachko and Eva. “Move to last night.”

  “What about it?”

  “The scene at the fallout shelter—why? You tortured her, you destroyed her life, then you set it up for her daughter to finish her off—and burn to death herself, too. You hated her, I understand that. She crossed the Cheka, I understand that, too. But why go to all that trouble?”

  “I believe this interrogation is over. I have nothing more to say, and I do have a plane to catch. I’ll take the records now. How did you find them, by the way?”

  “Not quite yet.” I took the SIG Pro from my vest pocket. “Raise your hands.”

  He laughed. “Turbo, such melodrama. You’ve been in this decadent country too long. You think you’re Clint Eastwood
.”

  “No drama, Iakov. Hands up.”

  He raised them slowly, still smiling. I ran my free hand over his suit. A Beretta in the waistband, which I tossed aside. The cell phone was in his breast pocket.

  “Hands down now,” I said as I dialed the office. Foos answered right away. “This the phone that called Eva last night?”

  “Give me thirty seconds.” He came back on in twenty-five. “That’s it.”

  “From Front and Dover?” I said, eyes on Iakov. The smile narrowed.

  “That’s right,” Foos said.

  “Can you testify to that, under oath?”

  “If that’s what you need, sure. He used a carrier that’s easy to track.”

  “That’s exactly what I need.”

  I pocketed the phone. “There’ll never be a trial in Moscow, that’s true—but there will be one here, maybe two. One for the murder of Ratko Risly. You’ve confessed to that. And one for the murder of Polina.”

  The grin was back. “You left out Eva.”

  “Eva didn’t die. I was with her. I opened the door and triggered the booby trap. I tried to save Polina, but she was already too far gone.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that, Turbo. You were in Brighton Beach.”

  “That was a good trick you pulled, with Mulholland. But I got back early, and I had help. Eva would have opened that door. Someone stopped her.”

  “Help? Who?”

  Iakov didn’t know about Petrovin. That was good for Petrovin. “A friend, a Russian friend. He’s close to Ivanov.”

  The smile disappeared.

  “That piece today…”

  “I can play tricks, too.”

  “This is pointless, Turbo. Like a Politburo debate. We all knew the outcome before we started. A phone call is nothing. Give me those records. I want to catch my plane.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Iakov. You should have stayed at home, where you’re untouchable—but there was too much at stake, wasn’t there?”

  “I told you, Cheka honor.”

  “No. That’s not it. Never was. This is about the Cheka, but it’s more about you. The apartment bombings were never Patrushev’s operation—they were yours. Gorbenko didn’t report to him, he reported to you. You didn’t have Putin’s okay—you were too wily to ask for it, he was too cautious to give it. All went well until Gorbenko realized he was on a one-way trip to his grave. Somebody must’ve made a mistake. Could even have been you. Doesn’t matter now. It all began to come apart with Ryazan. You had to fix it—to save your own skin. You went back to cover your tracks. You got most of them—Kosokov, the bank, Gorbenko, you probably doctored the files to make Patrushev appear responsible—but you missed two. Kosokov copied the records. And Eva. She was in the barn. She saw you. She watched you set the fire that killed Kosokov and almost killed her. That night at Greene Street was the first time she’d seen you since she was nine years old. No wonder she was terrified. Even doped up silly, she knew you’d come back for her.

  “You can’t prove—”

  “It’s the reason you worked over Polina the way you did. You needed the girl. You needed Polina to make that call. From what I could see, she held out as long as she could—longer. Whatever else you say about her, she loved Eva.”

  “You still can’t prove anything.”

  “You forget. I have Kosokov’s records. The one unmolested set. The ones he hid, you couldn’t find, and Polina took with her. The ones that made her go to you in December when she needed money. She saw what I saw. Kosokov covered his ass. He made sure every transaction was client-approved. The client doing the approving is you, Iakov. ChK22—that’s your Cheka designation. She knew enough to recognize it. So did I.”

  He took a step back. It might have been the darkness, or my imagination, but the blue eyes turned color, closer to Lachko’s gray. “What do you want? Money? Position? Rehabilitation?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a Chekist anymore, Iakov. I’m just an old zek trying to make my way. I was reminded recently about the light of day. I want this whole affair to be seen in the light of day. That’s why there’s going to be a trial. Here. A jury may well decide there’s not enough evidence to convict, but the world—including Russia—will get to see what happened, in 1999, in those apartment buildings, at Rosnobank, in that barn, at Greene Street, last night under the Brooklyn Bridge. Russians will gain a little better idea who runs their country and how they came to be there. I’m not naive, I don’t expect much to change—but we’ve spent too long hiding under a cloak of secrecy and deceit. Tsarist cloak, Bolshevik, Stalinist, Chekist, doesn’t matter. They’re all the same. I’m pulling this one off so everyone can see. That’s what I want.”

  “SERGEI!”

  “I’m right here,” a new voice said from behind. “Drop the gun, shit-for-brains. Only thing pulled gonna be this trigger.”

  Sergei stepped out of the same pipe section I’d been standing in a few minutes before, his big frame just visible against the wall of darkness behind. He held a silenced machine pistol at his hip, like the ones in the car. I let the SIG fall from my hand.

  “Move away from him,” Sergei said. “Over there.”

  “No.”

  “Turbo, don’t be stupid,” Iakov said. “There’s no point now. You played out your hand. You lost. Game over.”

  He ran his hands over me and pulled out the hard drive, the recording device in my vest, the detonator, and his cell phone and mine. He picked up my gun and moved away.

  “Clint Eastwood,” he said. “Nobility is a fool’s pursuit. If you’re lucky, you end up a dead hero. Usually you just end up dead. Especially when you’re stubborn.

  “Just so we’re clear, not that it will matter. Lachko knows nothing of this. Sergei has worked for me for years. Long before Lachko. I recruited him into the Cheka, like you. I flattered you at the hospital, when I said you were the best. Loyalty’s the ultimate test, Turbo. I thought you’d learned that back in 1988.”

  I wasn’t ready to fold. Not yet. “I’m not stupid, Iakov. You trained me, remember. I copied that hard drive. It’s in a safe place. Anything happens…”

  “You’re bluffing. I don’t blame you, it’s all you have left. Even if you’re not, I’ll take that chance. I’ll be back in Moscow. Sergei will be in Brighton Beach. The girl … things happen, as we know. But no one will be able to put together the story you have, however fanciful. A nick to the Cheka’s pride, perhaps. We’ve endured worse.”

  He was right, of course. There would never be a trial in Moscow. Mulholland might try to protect Eva, but he didn’t begin to understand what he was up against. Polina was right to be paranoid. I, on the other hand, had been stupid and, worse than that, arrogant, thinking I could do this myself.

  “I’m sorry it worked out like this, Turbo. You always had this streak, you know, I saw it way back when you started with the Cheka. I thought you were smart, you’d learn how the world works, you’d adapt. After all, you’d survived all those years in the camps—you must have learned something. I was wrong. You didn’t learn. You had a chance in ’88. You made the right decision then. It was difficult, I know, but you overcame your misguided instincts and did what was best for yourself, your friends, the organization. I see now that was an aberration. You did what you did for whatever reason, but you hadn’t changed at all.”

  There it was. For me anyway, the final Russian irony. Absolution on my execution ground—from my executioner. I’d die, if not happy, without sin.

  “I have to get my plane,” he said. “Good-bye, Turbo. I wish it had been different, I mean that.”

  He started for the hole in the fence.

  “Not yet,” a new voice said.

  “WATCH OUT—IN THE PIPES!” I dove at Iakov. Sergei’s machine pistol flashed, and the fire was returned from in front. No noise, just deadly muzzle flame. Iakov sidestepped my lunge and turned toward the intruder, bringing up my SIG. Sergei’s muzzle fire arced upward and disappeared.
Iakov was lining up a shot in the dark.

  “NO!” I dove again, from my knees, knowing I was too late.

  More fire. The force of the slugs threw him back into me. I caught the body and we fell backward into the mud. He was dead before we got there.

  I sat in the muck holding his corpse. I felt motion to my right and heard running feet. A minute or two passed before Petrovin walked out of the darkness, dressed in black, head to toe. He held up his own machine gun. “Would have intervened sooner, but it took a while to find the clips for this thing. Next time leave them in one place. Dead?” he said.

  “You hit him square.”

  “Big guy, too.”

  My head was spinning. “How’d you find me?”

  “Victoria—and your friend with the hair. She got him to trace your cell phone. He pegged the call you made to Iakov. I convinced them to let me handle it, but I suspect the police aren’t far behind. Victoria—well, you know how patient she is. I heard that speech, by the way, the one about the trial and the cloak, while I was looking for the clip. You’d better watch that idealistic streak. Might cause you to fold prematurely.”

  He was smiling. I couldn’t respond. My mind was still on the dead man in my lap. All the emotions fought with each other—sorrow, anger, resentment, doubt—mostly aimed at myself.

  “He was going to kill you,” Petrovin said.

  “I know. I could have stopped—”

  “No. You did what you had to. And you didn’t change a thing. Not as far as he’s concerned.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “If I hadn’t killed him tonight, I would have sometime soon, back in Moscow.”

  A bell rang in my head. It pointed to something I should see but couldn’t quite make out.

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” I said. “Why?”

  “You don’t know? Polina was my mother.”