The Third Man In, page 14
I looked past them and through the windows at the car ahead. It looked to be half full of Muscovites no better off than the two workers across from me and maybe even the worse for wear. No matter how dim my prospects for continued employment might have been, just looking at the others on board the train made me feel like a ray of sunshine. I had spent the night entwined with a beautiful woman, I had a job for now, and I had a valid ticket out of the country. If I was going to be out of a job because Dmitrov’s signing fell through, I could at least say that things had been worse and I had experience starting over. Not that you want to become an old hand at it, but you get through it one way or another.
The train pulled up at the next station. The platform was empty and the doors opened and slammed shut in a breath. No one got on and the workmen’s eyes had closed.
I was getting off at the next stop and didn’t know how long I was going to have to wait, so I got up to stand by the door. I looked back at the last car on the train and saw one passenger alone in the car getting up from his seat at the very back. At first I didn’t get a look at his face—he was at an angle, with his back not fully turned toward me. It looked like he was wearing the same grey coat as the guy who had shadowed me on Gogolevsky Boulevard. This close it looked too upscale for Moscow subway wear, more of a high-fashion fit for a guy with a personal driver at his beck and call above ground, not utilitarian, not the stuff of someone heading to work or heading home from a night shift. Then for a split second he looked over his right shoulder and I saw him in profile. Still he was a full length of a subway car away. I couldn’t be sure that this was the guy who might have been tailing me above ground. I tried to get a better look at him but the train jerked to a stop and I reeled, almost hit the deck. The doors opened and I walked through but I didn’t see the passenger in that last car get off. And when the doors shut and the train rolled away, I took a close look at the last car and it was as empty as my savings account.
I must have been messed up even worse than I thought. The guy that had been in that now-empty last car, I could have sworn it had been Dubinin.
First thought: my mind is fuckin’ with me. I’d only had one concussion in my playing days but did I get another when I took the boot off my temple at the Boar’s Head? I looked for a simpler answer. More likely a hangover from the martinis was kicking in. Still, I couldn’t write it off that easily. I tried to put it together. I only had a glimpse for a second, not even a clean look. He was all the way at the back of the train. My mind raced. All Russians look alike. Well, no, not exactly true. There are Russian faces and all others are not. Dubinin had a Russian face, I thought, but his wasn’t a face on the street. Not one of those worn by the weary Muscovites who waited on the sidewalk outside the station. Not one of those worn by the workmen fighting their hangovers to earn enough rubles to invest in another hangover. Not one of those worn by the people who were riding the escalator up to ground level ahead of me. No, Dubinin’s face stood apart in a lot of ways. He looked like he had managed to avoid dirtying his hands with hardship. Default mode for Muscovites: grim stoicism. Default mode for Dubinin: smug self-satisfaction.
It wasn’t anything that I could say with a degree of certainty. Did the guy have a sunbed tan? Couldn’t tell. The light on that last car was dim, the windows scuffed and dirty. Was he a match on height and weight? Too much distance between us, too little time. I rewound the reel. Was he carrying anything? Couldn’t make it out or didn’t notice. No, wait, one hand up for balance, just before the train jerked to a stop, a gloved hand. Eye contact or recognition? Didn’t seem like it, wasn’t watching me, didn’t seem like he noticed me noticing him.
It wasn’t like I could call a cop. Not like a cop in any jurisdiction would believe me.
Logic was shouting in my ear: that couldn’t have been Dubinin. Common sense took up the chorus. I nodded my head like I was in agreement. That I thought I had just seen a dead man was something I’d have to keep to myself. Of course, it’s hard to enforce an embargo on stuff like that.
3
When I hit the street, my iPhone vibrated. Polo had texted me.
Shadow, have found him so call
First thing I thought was the same thing that I was trying to erase from my memory bank. But then I realized that he wasn’t talking about Dubinin. I checked my call record. I had missed six calls from Polo, the first on the walk back to Lee’s place.
I put in a call to him. No surprise, Polo was at the Merry Widow. No surprise, his research was being underwritten on my bar tab.
“Yes, is Polo,” he said.
“It’s Shadow. Give Nick your phone.”
He passed his iPhone to Nick. “Hold on,” the barkeep said and then I heard him slap the handheld on the counter and punt an Overrefreshed and Soon-To-Be-Barred Irregular out to the curb. “Yeah, what?” he said.
“What’s Polo’s tab at?”
“I think you’ll be able to pay it,” Nick said. “On installments.”
I laid out the limits of my generosity. He was to call me when Polo hit two hundred bucks. He then asked me if he could count on seeing me when I got back. “You’re not going out on another ‘assignment,’ are you?” he said.
I would have told him that I didn’t appreciate the mocking tone but this was probably three bucks a minute across eight time zones, so I let it slide. I asked him to pass the phone back to Polo.
“This better be good,” I said.
“Dmitrov,” he said. “I get message to him. He sends back.”
“How did you get a message to him?”
“VK. Is a dot-com, like Russian Facebook. He has three thousand comrades there.”
“How’d you get on it?”
“I have old account. Years ago.”
I knew that he had spent time in Russia. He never spelled out exactly what he did there. I suspect he kept that account open to fish for women, and I suspect women on there would think of him as a catch. What he does in the privacy of his own basement home is his business, not mine.
“So what did you say to him?”
“I said, ‘I am friend of scout who you know and he wants to talk. He wants to know how you are. Is worried.’ ”
“No names?”
“No team and no, not your name.”
I gave a couple of seconds’ thought to the situation. Polo had given Dmitrov or Whoever Was on the Other End Almost No Information but that was still Almost Too Much Information. Any good that might come out of Dmitrov knowing that it was me who was looking for him would be outweighed by the possibility that Someone Else might find that out. Someone Else who knew even the bare bones of Dmitrov’s story could have put it together that I was the one sniffing around for the kid, like a pig in pursuit of truffles. And Someone Else might include the guy who put the firecracker in Dubinin’s tailpipe.
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘Good. I am good. Tell him I play in Russia. I stay in Russia. I am not going to U.S.A.’ ”
“What else?’
“That’s all.”
“How do you know it’s even him? Every player in every league in the world has about a dozen fan pages set up that look like personal accounts. How many are there for Dmitrov on…what was it?”
“VK.”
“Yeah, how many are set up on VK in his name?”
“Maybe twenty.”
“So how do you know that it’s his account?”
“The stuff on his page. I become his friend. I see page. He has photo headshot taken by laptop. Video at home from iPhone. Not a fan. This is guy.”
“You matched the photos…”
“With photos of him online, the photo from the draft.”
That would be the photo of Dmitrov standing on stage at the draft in his L.A. sweater with one arm around Hunts and one arm around me. Better times for all of us.
“You see anything in the account? Any new entries?”
“Yes. Last one is a picture of the other boy…”
“Belov?”
“Yeah and it is his birthday and death day and what is Russian of Rest In Peace. Birthday is same as the one of Los Angeles site.”
“Anything more?”
“Last post, he says, ‘I must play for him the memory.’ ”
The call seemed to drop for a second.
“That’s good,” I said. “I mean, that’s pretty good.”
Pretty good return on the tab I’d have to cover, but still lots of yellow flags were waving, stiff in a cold, gale-force wind. Someone could have hacked into Dmitrov’s account. Even if it was Dmitrov whose fingers typed in the message back to Polo, nothing in their brief correspondence explained why the kid had gone AWOL. My benign reading had been the simplest one: Dmitrov was shaken by Belov’s death. That was still a possibility but one I wasn’t taking on faith.
“I keep looking,” Polo said.
He was still earning his beer.
“Okay, be careful. If you message him again, if you hear anything from him, don’t say anything about L.A. Not my name. Nothing that’s going to get me in a jam over here.”
“What should I say?”
I told him to ask a couple of innocuous-seeming questions and then I told him to pass his phone back to Nick.
“Maybe you should give me your credit card number,” he said. “A valid one.”
“I’m good for it and I’ll square it when I get back. Scout’s honour. Listen, keep him on my tab, but no hard stuff, okay? I need him halfway sensible.”
4
“Someone had a long night,” Kelly Markham said when I walked into the Marriott’s restaurant.
“Everyone had a long night of something,” I said. “Boozing, sleeping, whatever.”
“I can rule out sleeping. I’d say that you’ve got a nice glow, though, Shadow. Those are the same things you were wearing to the game last night, right?”
“I travel light. I haven’t felt obliged to make fashion statements since People stopped calling.”
“Here’s to better days,” Marks said, raising his cup of black coffee.
“I don’t know if my night could have been better,” I said. I looked around the room. Scouts from other organizations were rolling in. All of them looked like hell. For once, Marks was the one who didn’t tie one on the night before, an event that usually times out with a full lunar eclipse.
“Any word on your boy Dmitrov there? Is he gonna be in the line-up?”
At the mention of Dmitrov’s name, I saw a couple of scouts’ heads turn. I pushed my palms down, giving Marks the Voices Down Sign. “Word is that he’s okay, although why he’d leave the team I don’t know,” I said. “Lots of possibilities. Found a girl…”
“I hear they have them here,” Marks said.
“…he’s nineteen…”
“Youth wasted on the young.”
“…he’s broken up about his buddy’s death…”
“Touching.”
“…someone is in his ear…”
“All roads lead to the mighty dollar. I like that idea.”
I did too. You can’t even unlock the door to an arena, never mind get a game, until the cheque clears. Yeah, all roads do lead to filthy lucre and in Russia it’s especially filthy lucre.
“Do you think I can talk to Ivan? You’re seeing him here today, right?”
“Supposed to be, got the game at Luzhniki later, right?” Marks said, his hand shaking slightly and his coffee ready to fall out the overfilled cup he lifted off the table. He stooped halfway to bring down the risk of spillage. He had done this before, ‘before’ being every morning of his adult life. It was the only way he knew how to drink a cup of Morning Joe if it didn’t come in a cup with a lid.
“I want to ask him something,” I said.
“If it’s work, Shadow, it’s my ass if it gets back to my team, you know that,” he said. “You know how rumours are. Friends are friends and everything but this isn’t you and me splitting a cab, you know. I’ve already done too much.”
“I’ll owe you,” I said, “again.”
Marks nodded his head but didn’t look too happy about it while he texted Ivan a message to meet us. While he did that, I checked my iPhone. I had a text from Hunts.
Any luck? Pls God some good news
I went out on a limb based on Polo’s work on vk.com.
Might have a lead
I had freighted my plate with what looked safest at the breakfast buffet. I avoided the rubbery-looking scrambled eggs. I grabbed a yogurt and some fruit. It might have seemed pointless given my unhealthy lifestyle, but a turnaround has to start somewhere.
I held it in as long as I could. I don’t know why I told Marks of all people. Maybe because he had experience with pink elephant sightings and other drunken hallucinations.
“I saw something this morning,” I said. “On the subway.”
“What?”
“Dubinin.”
“What do you mean?”
“Him.”
“A guy who looks like him…”
“No, the guy. Dubinin. It was him,” I said and then realized how stupid it must have seemed to Marks. “Shit, I don’t know.”
I was already regretting bringing it up.
“I was wondering where the hell you went last night after the game. How drunk were you?”
“I wasn’t. I met that reporter from CNN for a drink and…”
“Don’t kiss and tell, Shadow. It will get back to the twins.”
“And I spent the night at her place. Coming back here on the subway I…”
I figured I should couch it.
“…thought I saw him. And I was being tailed before that up on the street. That’s for sure.”
“You were coming back from her place, so maybe someone who was watching her…”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. That hadn’t occurred to me.
“Look, Shadow, you’re just messed up. No sleep. Whatever. It was nothing. Forget about it.”
I didn’t let it go. “Thing was, I felt pretty clear-headed. The cold, I mean, any buzz, that froze it right out of me. And I wasn’t distracted. Wasn’t like there were a lot of people on the train. Practically no one…”
“You think you had one of those drug interactions? You know some of those things you’re not supposed to drink with. You’re not taking anything for pain, are you?”
Marks would know about alcohol and interactions with everything, so I wasn’t surprised that he’d walk me down this avenue to try to explain the unexplainable. With Celebrex and booze it’s strictly water retention, maybe a jump in blood pressure, but nothing more than that.
I shook him off without a word.
“So you’re saying that the guy who was in the car when it blew up ended up landing on his feet and walked away.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what I don’t know.”
A lot of people in the league would have laughed at the idea of recruiting Kelly Markham as a sounding board. Marks heard me out. Not that he had anywhere to go, though he might have wished he had somewhere else he had to be.
5
“I don’t know how I can help you, Bradley.”
“I don’t know if you can. That’s why I’m calling.”
Ollie Buckhold’s secretary had told me he was in Sweden. Buckhold was looking after a little bit of business with a pair of kids with the Djurgården team in Stockholm. My first two calls rang through to voicemail while Marks and I waited for Ivan. It turned out Buckhold had been on the phone making a reservation at the Café Opera. I deal with agents as a last resort but that’s what I was down to. If anyone might have the 411 on Dmitrov, Buckhold was the most likely candidate, at least in a camp friendly to ours. He had acted on Dmitrov’s behalf bringing him to the draft and in the eyes of the league he was still the kid’s agent of record. Ollie might have even been kicking back money to Dubinin and promising him a bigger payoff on delivery.
“Ollie, look, I just want to make sure that you have a release from Metallurg in place for Dmitrov,” I said. “I’m here in Moscow and I’m hearing rumbles that it’s falling through or something.”
“That’s not my understanding, Bradley.”
“Is there paperwork in place? Terms? The kid’s good with our numbers?”
I didn’t ask him the overriding question, namely: “Are you still representing him?” If he had been having issues with the kid, he wouldn’t have admitted it, not until a change of agent was officially registered with the league and the players’ association. Which it wasn’t. Yet.
“Brad, it’s like all things there. You know that. I’ve had sure things fall through before, sure, but we’ll get this done.”
“Do you know he bolted from the team? No one knows where he is.”
Ollie dissembled. It was all breaking news to him, but he wouldn’t say so. “I have been trying to reach him,” Ollie said, still maintaining a professional calm despite the unsettling bulletin. “I haven’t talked to him in a while, just an email message every week or so. You do have his email, right?”
“Yeah, I tried and nothing.”
“Myself, I haven’t tried the last couple of days. I’m sure that he’s upset about his friend’s death.”
“He’s not the only one. You had Belov as a client, right?”
“I did, Brad, and it’s a tragedy, but there’s only so much that I can say to you right now about that,” Buckhold said.
That caught me off guard. Ollie is a born talker. It’s his living and his nature. I could have understood if he had been guarded about ongoing, tenuous negotiations with Dmitrov or another player. With a client who had died, though, Ollie’s interests would have died with him. He couldn’t have cause to clam up. I nudged him on the point.
“How’s that?”
“Bradley, you know I’m a lawyer and when I have another lawyer instruct me…”
When a lawyer calls a lawyer, it’s usually too late to run for the bunker.
