No one goes to Russia on a honeymoon.
Nebraska .. . Illinois . . . Kansas.
This could have been any of them, not that he'd ever been to the Midwest either. Like now, he'd only seen those places from the air. Couple of times.
Once, ten years ago, he and his partner flew to Los Angeles to pick up a young female fugitive. She had hired two kids to snuff her husband because he was cheap and boring. It was in all the papers. She made bail, climbed into her car, then drove out to California because she always wanted to be an actress. Six months later, she actually got a job. She's in this mouth wash commercial, the dumb shit, like it never occurred to her that about half of Queens would recognize her the first day it ran.
Anyway, that was the first time in an airplane for either of them. Katz, then his partner, was like a kid. Even kept the vomit bag for a souvenir.
The second time was last year when Carla Benedict's kid sister got killed. He and Elena flew out for the funeral, partly to pay their respects, but mostly because his daughter was already out there with Bannerman and he wanted to make sure Susan was far out of harm's way in case Carla, who is not known for her stability, started leaving bodies all over the streets. ,
But Lesko didn't want to think about Carla. Or bad times. Sad times. He blinked the picture away and replaced it with one of Elena. The way she looked, the ceremony. Looking up at him. Saying ”I do.” And then mouthing the words, “Oh, I do, Lesko. I surely do.” Susan in the front row, crying. She even got him doing it. Half the church, in fact, was holding hankies and the other half were shaking their heads like they still can't believe this is happening. He didn't blame them.
Those two flights to California .. .
Sometimes, like now, he could not help but be amazed at the way his life had turned between them.
Five years ago, he was still a New York cop. His total travel experience had been a cut-rate cruise to Bermuda with his wife before she divorced him and that one plane ride with David Katz. It was then, come to think of it, when Katz first developed the expensive tastes that ended up getting most of his face blown off.
They had two extra days due to some screwup with the paperwork. Katz couldn't believe all the good-looking women. And he couldn't get enough of Rodeo Drive. A month later he's wearing Italian shoes and these baggy California clothes that make you look like you just lost forty pounds. One day, a few months later, he runs into Katz out at Giants Stadium and Katz is wearing a gold Rolex. He swore that he hit a trifecta up at Milford Jai Alai in Connecticut. Said he had witnesses. Said don't worry, he won't wear it on the job. He knows how it could look.
What Katz was really hitting was couriers. Not for the drugs. For the money. It still bothered Lesko that he should have known. He should have broken Katz's face while he still had one. But if he had, he wondered, where would he be right now? It was Katz getting killed that changed his life.
His own biggest ambition had been to put in his twenty-five, buy into this sports bar in Queens that had three big-screen televisions, and spend a little more time with his daughter before she meets the right guy and gets too wrapped up with a family of her own. Take her to some Knicks and Giants games. Have some good talks. Check out, like any good father, the guy she's seeing.
He sure as hell blew that one.
Anyway, now all of a sudden he's a globe-trotter.
Raymond Lesko, a third-generation Polish Catholic cop, has gone from a one-bedroom walk-up off Queens Boulevard to a villa in Zurich filled with about a zillion dollars' worth of art and antiques. It's Elena's house, of course. And there's also a summer place in Antibes and an apartment in London, both of which Elena tried to have her lawyers put in his name until he found out and stopped it. She said it was a wedding present. She said it was nothing compared to what he'd given her. But no way.
Lesko looked at his watch. In two hours, they'll have been married one week. It seemed to be lasting.
As for what he'd given her... a month ago Elena had taken him out to a crowded restaurant and, while he had a slab of roast pork in his mouth, broken the news that she was already four months pregnant. He almost needed a Heimlich. She sits there, tears rolling down her face, asking him not to be angry with her. She would have told him sooner, she says, but the mood was never right and he had so much on his mind already—she was babbling now—and she was frightened that he would feel entrapped now that she was actually pregnant. That he would leave her. But please don't, she says. In no way, she says, does this require that he marry her unless, of course, marriage is a thing that he might consider. This is the way Elena talks.
“Elena ... that's wonderful,” was how he answered. “What... do you mean? What is wonderful?” “The roast pork, Elena. What do you think I mean?” Then she began bawling. Out loud. Hardly stopping for air.
The whole idea of taking him out to dinner was so that he wouldn't yell or scream, and here she is acting like he'd just told her that the dinner was really her pet Pekingese. He had to walk around the table, kneel down at her side, hold her, and say all the things she needed to hear, whether he was sure that he meant them yet or not.
The Finnair jet was dropping quickly. Now he noticed that most of the roads seemed to be unpaved. A lone truck was kicking up dirt on one of them. He saw very little traffic otherwise.
No towns either. This was more like the Russia he'd imagined.
One large cluster of buildings caught his eye. It was well away from any main artery. The buildings, shaped like barracks, were painted a dirty white and their roofs were of rusting corrugated steel. Leo Belkin, leaning from the seat behind him, said it was a collective farm. Lesko thought it looked more like a prison farm, but Elena dug her nails into his hands before he could say so.
Be polite, Lesko.
This is Leo's homeland. We are his guests. Relax and enjoy.
Guests, my ass, Lesko said in his mind.
It was not that he didn't trust Leo Belkin. They were not going to be shipped off to some gulag as soon as they landed. This was the new democratic Russia. Maybe, just maybe, the trip really was a wedding present and Leo did not have some kind of hustle going.
It was just that lately he seemed to catch Belkin staring at him an awful lot. And then looking away. It's like when you do have a scam going and you keep looking at the intended patsy to see if he's started to catch on yet.
Well... benefit of doubt. By any standard, Leo has been a good friend. He'd certainly helped them clean up Zurich. Felony drug arrests down almost forty percent. Most of the known dealers either out of the business, out of town, or dead. A few Swiss bankers in jail and several more under indictment. The Platzspitz was a park again instead of an open-air drug market. There was still some small shit on the street, of course, but most of the heavy users have followed the dealers.
And in California, when Carla went crazy, Leo was right there. Carla came back to Switzerland with Leo's young assistant, Yuri, who got shot up, and Leo's been helping Carla make a life over here. And then, two yeas ago, he also helped Bannerman track down that bunch who ambushed Elena's car and put a couple of holes in her. Her left arm still isn't right. She says it's fine, but it isn't. There's nerve damage.
Looking at Leo, you'd never guess. He's a rumpled little guy, looks like a college professor, bald, always sucking on a pipe he never lights or sipping at a glass of wine he never really drinks. Accent sounds more continental than Russian. Good guy, gets invited to a lot of parties, can play any song Cole Porter ever wrote. Everyone likes him. Even Bannerman likes him. But even Bannerman said be careful.
What you'd never guess is that Leo is a KGB general.
Or was. Or still is.
It's hard to keep track, these days, of what he is and what they call themselves. The Russian leaders keep coming up with new names for the KGB, trying them on for size, looking for something that sounds a little more benign, but nobody else pays much attention.
For a while, the KGB had become the MSB. Stands for “Inte
r-Republican Council for Security.” But when the republics went their own way, there were suddenly twelve new names for the KGB. Russia's, last he heard, was .the Agency for Federal Security.
Bannerman says don't get a headache over it. Regardless of what anyone else calls them, he says, KGB is still what they call themselves. They're still entrenched and they still have teeth.
Anyway, back to Leo ...
Leo used to work for Department 4 of the First Chief Directorate, which was and still is Foreign Intelligence. Department 4 takes in all of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Bannerman says it still does. He says Leo is still top dog, their senior Rezident, for all three countries. His base is at the Soviet embassy in Bern, but he hangs out mostly in Zurich because that's where the money and the power is. He stays close to Elena's family, the Bruggs, because that's where the biggest money is. And the most power.
Elena brought his hand to her lips. She kissed the spot where she'd dug her nails into it. Then she held it against her cheek. Elena. Even now, Lesko could scarcely believe that this was happening. That he was here with her. That she could love him.
Beauty and the Beast.
Lesko could not count the times he read those words on the lips of people who saw them together. Or else they would assume he was her bodyguard.
“You imagine this, Lesko,” she would say. “It is not true.”
“It doesn't bother me. But yeah, it's true.”
“Nonsense. You are an extraordinarily attractive man.”
“Elena, face it. I look like a bouncer. When I was a cop it was at least useful, but now it's, well. . .”
“It's what?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
There was hardly a morning when he wouldn't stand in front of a mirror and wonder if this is the day when she'll take a good look at him. It wasn't that he was ugly. His features were okay, he supposed. But, like Katz used to say, there was something about his eyes and his mouth, even when he was feeling good, that made him look like he was about to eat someone. Even more so when he smiled.
Plus which, he was an ox. Especially when he stood next to Elena. She had just turned forty-nine, only six years younger than he was, but she was very small and trim and elegant, and in the right light she could have been half his age. If that was a gap, the difference in their upbringings was an ocean.
Elena was born in Zurich but she was raised in Bolivia. Her mother had been sent to Switzerland to be educated but got trapped by the war. Meanwhile, she fell in love with one of the Bruggs, got knocked up, got married. The war ended and Elena's mother went home for a visit, but her family wouldn't let her come back because her husband wasn't a Catholic. Elena grew up in La Paz with English nannies, Swiss tutors, and more servants than your average hotel.
By the time she was twenty, Elena could speak five languages. It was no surprise, therefore, that all the big coca growers used her first as an interpreter and then as a negotiator. One thing led to another.
The cocaine wars of the seventies wiped out most of her family. Elena rose up, partly by attrition but mostly because she was smart and tough. And in her own way, she was straight. Anyway, before long, every DEA chart showing the cocaine hierarchy of Bolivia would have this little box, right at the top, with her name in it, but the box would always have dotted lines and a question mark, because no one had ever taken her picture and they weren't really sure whether Elena was a code name or more than one person or what.
Lesko shook off this train of thought. That was then. This is now.
One thing about those five languages. She hardly ever used anything but English in his presence. This was mostly good manners. The only other language he knew was some street Spanish, and not much of it was very polite. But he was learning German on the sly and one day soon he was going to surprise her with it.
“Such a rough man, Lesko. But such a good and brave heart.”
She would say things like that. Often. Out of the blue.
He'd catch her staring at him from across the room. She would say how lucky she feels. He would get tongue-tied.
His bathroom mirror aside, he had come to accept that Elena loved him. It was no less difficult to accept that he loved her. But he did. What she was before, the things she did before they met, had faded so completely in his mind that they were not even distant memories. It was only in a rare half-awake dream that he saw her standing in the back room of a Brooklyn barbershop with three dead men at her feet.
She was scared to death. Trembling. But she wouldn't beg and she wouldn't lie. She stood there, back straight, chin high, waiting for him to finish her as well.
Now here he is, five years later, fifty-five years old with a daughter who's twenty-six, about to have a kid with the woman who ordered the death of his partner.
Belkin was at his ear again, pointing out a monument and cemetery that marked how close the Nazi tanks got to Moscow before the Russian winter turned motor oil into glue. Says he had two uncles in that battle. One died later at Kursk. The other still lives in Moscow. Somewhere. His voice trailed off. It was Lesko's impression that they didn't stay in touch.
He had asked Belkin about his father. A normal question, right? But Belkin gave him this funny why-are-you-asking look. Just for a second. Then he looked away, muttered, “He's dead . .. many years,” and began glancing around the way you do when you're eager to change the subject. Lesko didn't push.
The subject he changed to was Leningrad, where he still has family, on his mother's side, still living in the same big house her family had owned before the Revolution. The way things are going, he said, they might own it again soon. For now, however, it's still shared with several other families.
Belkin especially wanted to show them Leningrad— which he had trouble calling St. Petersburg. Lesko didn't read anything into that. He himself had still called New York's airport Idlewild for years after they changed its name to JFK, and to this day you can't find a New Yorker who calls Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. Anyway ... Leo wanted to take them to this museum outside Leningrad where the Russian art treasures he'd brought back from California were back on display after being missing for nearly fifty years. That's what really got Leo his star ... or whatever it is they give Russian generals. And it was Bannerman who told him where to look by way of payback for his help.
Still, he owes Bannerman and he knows it. He also needs him because being wired into Bannerman's network, to say nothing of the Bruggs, is what gives him his clout in the KGB.
Elena knows all this. She says that's why he shouldn't let himself get paranoid about Leo's invitation. Don't look for a hidden motive, she says. You've been a policeman too long.
He'd tried telling her that his real reason for not wanting to go involved her pregnancy. Elena wasn't a kid anymore. Even if she stayed flat on her back for nine months, there were no guarantees that she'd carry the baby full-term.
But she didn't want to know that. Nothing could go wrong, because she had it in her mind that this kid was a miracle, an act of God, a reward for the way she'd redeemed herself and, not least, a gift to her new husband of the son he'd probably always wanted.
This, of course, was horseshit.
What it really was, was dragging him off to their bedroom three nights in a row last Christmas when she saw that her temperature was up. This was after several months of appointments with this new doctor she was seeing, probably getting pumped full of hormones and getting him, Lesko, to have his sperm tested. If you can picture that.
Even Susan was in on this somehow. All those calls back and forth between them. A sudden visit by Susan last December. In fact, all four of the future bridesmaids were around back then. Lots of whispering, sudden silences, smug expressions. Funny, he had forgotten about that until now.
Anyway, the bottom line was that Elena wanted a kid. She'd adopt one if she had to, she said. But first she wanted to try. She wanted a kid from her own belly. She wanted his kid whether he chose to stay with her or not.
In a way it was flattering, but in most ways it was crazy. To hear Elena tell it, he was—almost literally—the first man she'd ever loved. She was experiencing, for the first time, many of those romantic notions that most women outgrow by the time they're twenty. Like, that having a child is the fullest expression of love. That the offspring of a love so fine and pure must necessarily be perfect. Lesko, however, knew that having kids was a total crap-shoot. The kid was just as likely to be a creep.
He had lucked out with his daughter. From day one, Susan was all he could have asked for. She was bright, nice, good at sports, and she grew up drop-dead gorgeous. Katz used to say that Susan was the one who lucked out. That Lesko's genes had somehow skipped a generation. Katz said it was actually more than luck. It was a trick God pulled to keep the species going. Otherwise, he said, no wife would ever take a chance on having another you.
Yeah, well. . . fuck you, David.
Anyway, if Susan has a kid with anyone, it will probably be with Bannerman. Two years now, they've been ¿ving together. If they have one, and Bannerman runs screaming from the hospital when the nurse brings it to the window, he can't say he wasn't warned.
Susan could have done worse, he supposed. She also could have done better. Like a nice boring dentist—or even a lawyer, if she could find one with his hands in his own pockets.
It was not that he didn't like Bannerman. In most ways, Bannerman was every parent's dream of what their daughter might bring home. Well traveled, good manners, enough money, basically a straight arrow.
But Bannerman is a killer. You can dress it up any way you like, but that was what it comes down to.
In his head, Lesko heard a snort from David Katz. He tried to ignore it.
Fucking Katz.
He listens in to private thoughts, adds his two cents, and, most times, totally misses the point.
Lesko knew what he'd say. “Give Bannerman a break, Lesko. It's not like you never killed anyone.”
Maybe. But not for money.
“The city paid us, Lesko. And the Bruggs are paying you now. What do you call that?”
Bannerman's Promise Page 2