by Tim Dorsey
For some reason, the mob wasn’t seeing a lot in tips. Not the kind of money Eugene was making. They proposed a split. Eugene would be allowed to expand into their territory. He’d return a piece of his action from Hell’s Kitchen, and they’d give him a taste of Little Italy and protection from the crazy Jamaican gang that was already running a wicked urinal guy operation in Jersey and Queens.
Business boomed. Le Cirque, the Ritz-Carlton, the River Café. In the middle of an eight-hundred-dollar night in the Russian Tea Room, he pulled the paperback out of his pocket again and smiled at the cover. Eugene decided that if he ever got the chance, he’d make sure he thanked Ralph Krunkleton in person.
29
December thirtieth in New York is no time for shorts and tropical shirts. The Russians stood rubbing their arms in the cab line outside JFK.
“Screw this,” said Ivan. “I know a trick.”
They went back inside and followed the arrows to curbside check-in. They waited until a taxi dropped off a fare, then sprinted outside.
“Manhattan!” yelled Ivan.
“It’s against the rules. I’m supposed to go back to the pickup zone and wait at the end of the line…” The driver stopped and looked around quickly. “Get in!”
They pulled away from the airport. Ivan looked out the window and saw a giant metal sphere flickering through the trees, the old ’64 World’s Fair globe in Flushing Meadows. He sat back in his seat and noticed a thin ribbon of incense smoke by the dashboard, but it was no match for the foul human smell. Strange, mystical music came from the radio. The driver had oily hair and a scraggly beard.
Ivan leaned to the partition. “Are you an immigrant?”
“No. College student.”
The driver made an unexpected turn, and Ivan was pitched against the door. A recorded message came on in the backseat. “This is Paul O’Neill of the New York Yankees asking you to hit a home run for safety. Please buckle up.”
They entered the Midtown Tunnel under the East River and came out in Manhattan. Then the fun. Thrills, spills, the driver bench-testing axle strength, better than any amusement ride back in Orlando. They headed north, their taxi joining a sea of yellow cabs weaving up the Avenue of the Americas. The Russians saw there were lanes painted in the road, but that was clearly part of an ancient custom from some long-forgotten people.
The taxi screeched to the curb, tossing the Russians into the partition. “There she is,” said the driver. “The famous Warwick. The Beatles used to stay there. And Cary Grant lived in one of the rooms for twelve years…”
The Russians dashed into the building and stomped their feet for circulation as they waited at the registration desk. They took hot showers and had the bell captain send up a clothier. They checked the time. Four hours until the meeting Mr. Grande had set up with Yuri.
“I’m hungry,” said Vladimir.
“Me, too,” said Dmitri. “But I’m tired of all this American food.”
Five smartly dressed men in new fur coats walked down West Fifty-seventh. The one carrying the silver briefcase gestured, and the rest followed him into a restaurant under a red sidewalk canopy. The Russian Tea Room.
“Get a load of this place,” said Alexi, slowly turning around. Bright red carpet and red leather banquettes, gold firebirds on the walls, gold on the ceiling, and gold samovars on the counters, for tea. The Moscow skyline carved in ice.
“Incredible,” said Vladimir, studying a scale model of the Kremlin.
Ivan watched a sturgeon swimming in a fifteen-foot revolving aquarium shaped like a bear. “Everyone back home should get a chance to see America. We certainly don’t have anything like this where we come from.”
They waited in the lounge for their table. The bartender came over. “What’s your pleasure?”
“What should we get?” Dmitri asked the others.
“When in Rome…” said Ivan.
“Manhattans?” said Dmitri.
“Try the Russian Quaalude,” said a stockbroker three stools down.
“Never heard of it,” said Ivan. “What’s in it?”
“Not sure,” said the broker, turning to the bartender. “Hey Bob, what’s in a Russian Quaalude?”
“One second,” said the bartender, walking to a wall phone by the stemware.
Alexi got nervous and stood up. “Who’s he calling?”
“Relax,” said Ivan. “This is America. He’s on the bartender hotline.”
The man hung up and returned. “Frangelica, Baileys, vodka, layered in that order.”
“Five,” said Ivan.
The bartender grabbed a bottle of vodka by the neck. “I was a technical adviser for the movie Cocktail.” He swung the bottle up quickly like he was going to twirl it in the air but didn’t release, for liability reasons. “The trick to twirling bottles is to pick ones with only a little liquor left. The cast tried to twirl full bottles. Liquor flew everywhere. Had to edit it out.”
Dmitri whispered to Ivan: “You meet everybody in New York.”
Their table was ready when they finished the drinks. They all got the hot borscht and Stroganoff, except Dmitri.
“How’s the chicken Kiev?” he asked the waiter. “I hate it when it’s tough.”
The waiter said it wasn’t.
Sevruga caviar and gazirovannaya vodka arrived, then the main course. The men ate with gusto as they admired winter paintings above their booth by Surikov and Kustodiev. Dmitri poked his chicken with a gold fork. “It’s tough. I knew it.”
In the back of the restaurant, a visitor from Florida sat alone, sipping tea, reading a paperback.
The check arrived. Ivan patted his full stomach. “We better get going for the meeting. Who has to take a leak?”
They went downstairs to the men’s room. After finishing business, Ivan set the briefcase on the floor and turned on the ornate gold faucets. The others lined up at adjacent sinks and turned more gold faucets.
Eugene Tibbs handed out paper towels.
Ivan lifted the lid off a jar. “Mint?”
“Take as many as you want.”
The Russians each took one of the round, hard, red-and-white mints. They liked those.
Ivan threw a five in the tip basket and picked up his briefcase.
The Russians started across midtown on foot, the temperature dropping fast. They picked up the pace, passing twenty consecutive windows with pictures of restaurant owners and Giuliani. Icy gusts blew down the Seventh Avenue canyon. More windows, more pictures. Pauly Shore, Ron Howard, Julie Newman, Goldie Hawn, Kim Basinger, Mike Tyson, Damon Wayans.
Ivan pointed across the street at a blue-and-yellow sign, LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN. “We’re getting close.”
They went around the south side of the Ed Sullivan Theater, over to Fiftieth Street and down the stairs into the subway.
“Where is it?” asked Alexi.
“Not sure,” said Ivan, reading his own scribbling on a Moon Hut matchbook.
“You said we were supposed to meet Yuri and make the submarine deal at a clandestine KGB document drop station.”
“That’s right. It’s disguised as a little subway bakery—bagels and stuff for morning commuters.”
Dmitri looked across the subway platform. Nobody else except a man in a trench coat playing the tenor sax in a rueful way that made people want to forgive Third World debt. A deep rumbling noise grew out of the darkness at the end of the platform, then a bright light. A late train on the 1-2-3-9 roared out of a tunnel and stopped. The doors opened. Nobody got on or off. The doors closed. The train left.
Vladimir studied a map on the wall. “I think that was the red line.”
A gravelly voice: “Are you looking for Siberia?”
The Russians turned around. A homeless face poked out of the shadows from a dark corner of the platform.
“What’d you say, old man?”
“You looking for Siberia? That Commie place?”
The Russians glanced at each other. The docume
nt drop station was a tightly guarded Soviet secret. Just great. Even the bums knew about it. And he was calling it Siberia, adding insult.
“I’ll tell you for a dollar,” said the bum.
Ivan handed him a folded George Washington.
“Go over this platform and around to the other train. Don’t worry if you think you’ve gone too far—just keep going. It’s way down in the bowels of this thing. You’ll find it, just keep going down….”
They started walking away. Ivan stopped and turned and called back to the old man. “How do you know about this place? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“It is a secret,” said the bum. “But the in-crowd knows about it. They’re always coming by to check it out, usually on the weekend if there’s nothing else to do.”
“It’s become idle amusement?”
“Pretty much,” said the bum.
“Wonderful,” said Igor.
The Russians went farther down into the subway. And down. And down.
“Where the hell is it?” asked Vladimir.
“He told us to just keep going,” said Ivan, trotting down another flight of stairs. “If we…hold it, what’s that?”
They saw a dark glass door and approached slowly. The door had a little sign. In small, plain black letters: SIBERIA. Ivan thought he heard something. “Is that music?”
Next to the door were several large windows, also dark, wallpapered from the inside with newspaper clippings. The Russians began reading the articles, all about the discovery of a Soviet document drop station. Their hearts sank. Ivan continued reading: in the mid-nineties, someone had leased the shop for a pub, and they started knocking out interior walls for more space. That’s when they found all the KGB documents and Russian passports and rubles inside the studwork. The clippings said the station was traced to a Soviet agent known as Yuri, who had fled long before the FBI swarmed the place. Other articles chronicled the new, literally underground, coolest bar of the moment that had since sprouted at the location. One story explained that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority doesn’t allow bars in the subway, but this specific location fell in a jurisdictional crack because of complex subterranean rights with foreign corporations in the area of Rockefeller Center.
“There goes the rendezvous,” said Ivan. He took several deep breaths of subway exhaust. “What the hell—let’s get something to drink.” He opened the door.
Inside was a dive’s dive, like if the producers of Animal House rejected a set for being too slovenly. Nobody picked up the empties, which collected on tables with cigarette butts and got knocked over and rolled under broken chairs and sofas. There were two undependable jukeboxes, a novelty photo machine, and cases of Amstel and Red Stripe stacked high against walls with profane graffiti. Behind the bar, a row of Russian military hats hung from the shelf that held the liquor bottles, over a picture of Hillary and the owner.
The bartender yelled over the Clash on one of the jukes: “What can I get you guys?”
The Russians began draining longnecks.
“…The shareef don’t like it…”
Ivan heard a familiar voice. He turned around. In the darkness, at one of the tables, a squat old man made a sales pitch to a pair of Juilliard students. He held up a painted wooden figure, twisted it apart at the middle, and took out a smaller figure. Then he twisted that one apart and took out an even smaller one, and so on until he had six figurines of descending size lined up across the table. The man gestured proudly.
“Twenty dollars is a lot of money,” said one of the students. “I don’t know.”
“What’s not to know?” said the man. “These are genuine Romanov nesting dolls. Almost a century old, worth a fortune. This is the bargain of a lifetime!”
“Then why do you have them? How can you sell them so cheap?”
“I told you, after the breakup, the whole country’s for sale. You name it, I can get it. Rocket launchers, cadaver parts, tsarist dinnerware…”
“No, thanks,” said the students, getting up and leaving.
“Wait! Let me show you how they reassemble….” The man desperately pieced the dolls back together. “That’s the genius of these things. That’s the whole beauty…” His voice trailed off. “…shit.”
“…Rock the casbah!…”
Ivan walked up from behind. “I hear you’re the sorry bastard I’m supposed to see about a submarine.”
Yuri turned around and his eyes lit up. “Comrade!” They gave each other big, slapping bear hugs.
Ivan gestured around the room. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“It’s a crazy story,” said Yuri. “After the big Soviet collapse, there was no money. The KGB got behind on the rent, evicted. They wouldn’t even bring me home—just cut me loose over here.”
“They laid you off?”
“Can you believe it? And after all the microfilm I smuggled in my ass for those guys. I said I’d appeal. They just told me to take a powder—a cyanide powder, and they laughed. Personally, I don’t think that was very professional.”
“But what are you still doing here?” asked Ivan. He pointed back at the articles in the window. “They said you had fled. Nobody knew where you went.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too. Isn’t that weird? I’ve never left. Even when the FBI was here. I kept tapping them on the shoulders and asking if there was anything they wanted to know, but they just told me to stay out of the way and went back to tearing out the walls with demolition saws. I even tried to get asylum. Back when the Cold War was hot, you got asylum, you were set. Nice house, credit cards. Today, if you used to be KGB, you can’t get arrested. The CIA won’t return my calls. The people who own this place keep me around like a novelty, all my drinks are free. I can’t complain. Speaking of which: Bartender! Stoli!”
The bartender placed six shots on the table, the surface of the clear liquor vibrating as another subway train thundered by on the other side of the wall.
“So this place went from being a document drop to a bar?”
“Not directly. After the Kremlin lapsed on payments, it first became a hip-hop kung fu video store. They had these stereo speakers pointed out the door at top volume twenty-four hours, and passing commuters heard all this crazy urban martial-arts screaming: ‘Eeeeeee-yahhhhh, motherfucker!’ Jesus, was I glad to see that go. I couldn’t hear myself think in here. I was trying to get résumés out at the time. The Canadians were hiring in the Tribeca office.”
“The Canadians spy on the United States?”
“Not really, but they like to keep a few nominal cells active for national pride. They have this big inferiority thing, or so I’ve heard. They gave me an interview, and I told them I knew how to kill with a single sheet of typing paper, but they said they weren’t interested unless I could hit Céline Dion, and then they laughed. Again, not funny.”
Ivan nodded with empathy. “I hate to mix business, but there’s this matter about a sub.”
“We’re all set for delivery,” said Yuri. “It’s a Perestroika Class attack submersible, one of the small ones but still nuclear, with beverage holders, so you’re getting your money’s worth. We sail in February from the North Sea, at four knots through the NATO array of hydrophones. But I wouldn’t lose sleep. Even if we get caught, it’s no biggie. Nobody cares anymore—all the rules are new. We’ve still got hydrogen bombs, but who knew the Internet would be the thing? Suddenly, rock doesn’t crush scissors. ‘Hey, we can blow you up!’ ‘So what? Your bandwidth stinks.’ We’re like organ-grinders to these people.”
The bar’s owner walked up to the table. “Hey, Yuri! I see you brought some of your Russian friends. I sure hope you’re not doing any spying! Ha, ha, ha, ha…” The owner walked away, still laughing.
“See?” said Yuri.
“What I wouldn’t give for a poisoned umbrella,” said Dmitri.
Ivan lifted the briefcase and set it on the table.
Yuri smiled. He cracked his knuckles and
licked his lips, then turned the briefcase around to face him. “This is what I’ve been waiting for.” He flipped the latches and dramatically opened it with the lid facing the others.
Ivan was still smiling, but Yuri’s expression changed. He looked up. “What is this, some kind of sick joke?”
“What do you mean?” said Ivan. “It’s all there. Five million dollars!”
“Very funny.” Yuri spun the briefcase around.
“What the hell’s all this crap?” said Ivan. “Cologne, mints, condoms…”
The bar shook again as the subway rumbled by. It was late, only two people in the train: Eugene Tibbs in the first car, heading home with his silver briefcase, and in the last car, a tourist from Florida named Serge.
30
A sheet-covered body lay on the sidewalk outside a pizza parlor.
“Roll film!”
The location crew from Law & Order panned over the body and up to the actors talking on the curb.
Cars began honking and swerving as five Russians ran through the middle of traffic on Broadway, sprinting up the sidewalk past Jerry Orbach, hopping over the body and disappearing around the corner.
“Cut! Cut!” yelled the director.
The Russians crossed the street again, running up Fifty-seventh and back into the Russian Tea Room. They dashed down the stairs and burst into the men’s room. Empty.
They ran back up the stairs toward the dining room.
The maître d’ blocked their path. “Do you have a reservation?”
The maître d’s head bounced on the steps as he was dragged back down the stairs by the legs. They pulled him into the men’s room and slapped him around.
“Who’s the urinal guy?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Punch.
“Who’s the urinal guy!”
“I don’t know!”
They upended him and shook him by the ankles. Pocket change and silverware clanged on the tiles. A business card fluttered to the floor. Ivan picked it up.
“Big Apple Urinal Guys,” said Ivan. “Who’s that?”