The Third Man In, page 16
8
I was outside Luzhniki near the service entrance before the warm-ups, trying to look like I was minding my own business when I saw a black limo with opaque windows pull up. I was waiting for the guy riding in the back. No chance to nab him at the arena. No chance to cut through the crowd, not to mention his security detail.
Four beefy, dog-faced bodyguards jumped out of the limo first and surveyed the site. They advertised their roles with identical size 3XL black windbreakers with the logo of Starshnikov’s company over their hearts. The ugliest immediately spotted Marks, Ivan, and me standing inside the Too Close For Comfort Range. We were in violation of Russian Etiquette: no one is supposed to spoil the view for anyone on the Federation’s Power List. Back in the States, Vanity Fair puts together that list, but in Russia it emerges from the Kremlin in Putin’s handwriting. Stanislaus Starshnikov had been on the first page of that list for the better part of a decade. He didn’t wait for his muscle’s all-clear to step out of the limo. I recognized him from a file photo that ran with Ilya “The Real Deal-ya” ’s Yahoo column: a physically imposing guy whose thick neck, deep chest, and blunt nose betrayed a page of his personal history. It surfaced in every profile, the fact that he had been a wrestler who lost in the semi-finals of the Soviet Union Olympic trials to the defending world light-heavyweight champion.
Ivan tugged on my sleeve to pull me into retreat. I didn’t budge. Marks was unawares, down to the last drags on a butt.
“We go,” Ivan said with more than a little desperation. I yanked my right arm free. Marks turned around and did a double take. His bruises were still fresh and breaking flesh. He was ready to bolt.
“Tell them we’re here for hockey,” I told Ivan. “We’re from the league. Show them your pass.”
“They don’t care,” Ivan said, and they closed in on us. Ivan dug through his pockets for his KHL scouting pass, though this slowed them as much as a red cape would four bulls. One bodyguard mistook Ivan’s search for his credentials as an attempt to find his piece and in a blink we were staring at four arms drawn. Our hands shot up heavenward. Our prayers were then answered. Starshnikov recognized Ivan, who had coached Traktor Cheylabinsk a few seasons before. I don’t know exactly what he said, and Ivan was too rattled to translate. The boys re-holstered their pieces and shot nothing more than dirty looks at us.
“Tell him I want to talk about Dmitrov,” I said.
Ivan was doing the translation but before he could finish, the beautiful Starshnikova stepped out of the back seat of the limo in slow motion: one spiky heel and one prodigiously beautiful leg at a time. Her miniskirt covered the bare minimum, maybe not even that.
“Can legs be blond?” Marks asked me. “I swear hers are.”
He was looking too high. “You pervert,” I said. “She’s sixteen.”
“A sixteen-year-old sex bomb.”
Starshnikov’s head snapped and he glared.
“You asshole. The old man speaks English.”
Starshnikov walked toward Ivan. Starshnikova impatiently remained in rear flank, biting her lip and casting her trademark petulant look, like we had blown a line call on set point on the Wimbledon lawn.
Ivan told Starshnikov precisely who I was. He came off as a VIP who didn’t think anyone else was very important at all. He had no time and no interest in small talk.
“You killed the boy Belov,” he said. He didn’t sound like he believed it either, but the accusation cost him nothing but a breath.
“Bullshit,” I said, and right away I realized that might be a little indelicate, given our fragile and conditional peace.
“This is so? So maybe ‘bullshit’ is you to go to jail. I can make this happen if you like.”
I took a deep breath and counted back from one hundred.
“You wanted the boy Belov but you cannot have and you kill. Is terrible thing you do.”
I only got as far as ninety-seven. “I wanted Belov, sure,” I said. “Alive. He’s no good to me dead. Even if I couldn’t get him under contract, I wouldn’t kill him or anybody. Not him. Not Dubinin. But you probably know all there is about all the shit that’s gone down, don’t you?”
Like the lucky few in Russian high society, Starshnikov didn’t answer questions or even acknowledge them. He steamrolled belief into fact and moved on down the highway. “You want Dmitrov. This will not happen. Not now. Never.”
Ivan looked panicked. So did Marks. If there had been a Swiss flag they would have wrapped themselves in it.
If Starshnikov wouldn’t answer a question, I thought, maybe he’d bite on a goad. I cloaked my shots with a smile and a respectful tone, a head fake for his bodyguards who didn’t speak English. Sarge had pulled that same trick a thousand times. I raised the stakes with each little dig. “Dmitrov only wants what your daughter wants,” I said. “He only wants to play against the best in the world. It would be great to ask Dmitrov what he thinks, but I guess he’s not around. I guess you don’t know where he is. No one does.”
I could tell the sweet and sour registered with Starshnikov. His clout offered his daughter freedom of choice, and Dmitrov was not so lucky. And, just a guess, Dmitrov was acting out, rebelling against the unfairness of it all, when he went AWOL.
“We know where Dmitrov is. He will have a new contract. Until this contract is signed he does not play. When he signs he plays. That is all. He plays in KHL forever. This is good for him. Best. There is no need you be here anymore. You leave the country soon. Yes, you go. Or maybe you have to stay for trial.”
Starshnikov brushed me off with a backhanded wave and Exited Stage Left with his bodyguards without another word or backward glance. My instincts told me he had lied about knowing where Dmitrov was. I was about to say as much to Marks, but he was distracted.
“Look at those legs, damn,” he said. “They look like my second wife’s.”
9
Ivan went to get us bottles of water while Marks and I took seats twenty rows up in the corner.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” he said. He was talking about Starshnikov.
“Talking through his mink hat,” I said. “You play a guy whether you’re signing him or not. You don’t play a guy only if you’re going to trade him. But even with a guy you’re trying to trade, you at least get him to come in to practice, just in case the deal doesn’t get done. You definitely don’t keep him away from the team, especially some nineteen-year-old kid. God knows what kind of trouble he can land in if he’s off on his own for a few days.”
Marks had it figured out, so I didn’t give myself a prize for hockey psychology. “Plus you don’t want him to get the idea he can take off anytime he feels like it,” he said.
“Yeah, I don’t know what Starshnikov has going on but the line he gave us was a load of bullshit.”
“Us?” The old joke with the Lone Ranger and Tonto must have popped into Marks’s head.
Ivan came back with the waters and sat a row in front of my reluctant winger and me. Ivan never once glanced back at us during the warm-ups. Two guys in plain black trench coats, one thick wool, the other leather, sat in the same row as Marks and me, ten seats over to our right. One watched the game and the other kept a bead on us. Every five minutes they switched off. They probably couldn’t have told you who was playing. They were sitting on us and didn’t mind us knowing that they were sitting on us.
Ivan was no poker face. He kept glancing over at our watchers. He looked rattled enough that he would have signed a confession without bothering to read it. Marks was his boss, but those keeping tabs on us were the detail from the real management in the motherland. Marks and I had no standing as inostranets, foreigners.
I figured this signalled that the opportunity to get useful information from Ivan was fast coming to an end. I sympathized with his paranoia. I had contracted a mild dose of it myself. Embracing the Now or Never of the Thing, I doubled back.
“About Dubinin…”
“Talk hockey, please,” Ivan said. “Maybe we talk about later. On drive to hotel.”
“You keep saying Dubinin was ‘powerful.’ Powerful…how?”
“Kelly, tell him I no talk no more.”
“Go ahead,” Marks said. “If he asks a question, answer it. I mean, I’m curious too about whatever it is I’m getting dragged into deeper and deeper.”
Ivan took a deep breath.
“You played in Russia, yes? With Spartak, yes?”
“Yes and yes,” I said.
“And you do not know about Dynamo?”
“And I don’t know about Dynamo, no.”
Ivan lowered his voice, enough that I could barely hear him over the fans and the game on the ice. “Dynamo,” he said, “is the team of FSB. Before is team of KGB. Is more powerful than Red Army. Today special.”
“What?” I said. I felt my balls shrink to the size of dried lentils. “The fuckin’ KGB?”
“Yes and now is FSB. With Putin is FSB but it is same thing. Many people same.”
“Shit,” I said, feeling all of a sudden like I was up to my neck in the middle of a steaming pile of it. I had to strain to hear Ivan but he spelled it out.
“In Germany, Dubinin the father is for soccer, yes but only a little.” Ivan said. “Many players for many teams work for Lubyanka. Dynamo one hundred percent.”
“You’re telling me Dubinin’s old man worked for the KGB?” I said.
“When he plays soccer, yes, and after,” Ivan said. “Much work after. In Dresden he works. Many times Dubinin say father is friend of Putin. ‘President worked for my father.’ Say ‘is like my brother…is son to my father.’ ”
Ivan deepened his voice and thrust his thumb into his chest as he played the part of Dubinin the Younger. He overdid the brag but not by much.
“So Putin worked in Dresden…for Dubinin’s father.”
Ivan nodded in the affirmative and I leaned back in my seat dumbstruck. I had a whole new context for Dubinin’s life. He came by his arrogance honestly. He had been a child of privilege in a nation where privilege wasn’t supposed to have existed, in a nation where privilege was and is once again institutional and not to be questioned.
Any political elite has a thimbleful of humility to go around, the more powerful, the tinier the thimble. Ivan didn’t have to spell it out: the KGB was forged on a cult of superiority and the FSB was established and inspired by the ultimate company man, the self-styled action hero in charge in Mother Russia. On the ride out of the arena, Ivan confirmed all this. The intelligence service as The Best and the Brightest. Their patches as the hand-stitched monogram on the social fabric.
Dubinin wasn’t just a member of the cult but a legacy and exemplar.
“Dubinin has many things, yes,” Ivan said. “Here if FSB man sees something he likes, maybe car, maybe home, a few years ago, he just takes it. Even now they can do this. It is fear of many.”
“The ultimate platinum card,” Marks said.
I thought about the Benzes and BMWs and Jags in the VIP parking lot beside the arena. I had imagined that they belonged to the players. Now I was wondering who had their keys, the original owners or the FSB repo squad. And I thought about Dubinin’s Bentley. It was an easy indulgence for a guy if he had to pay nothing for it, if it was just a chit he had to call in. And it occurred to me that Dubinin could have been caught in the crossfire, some sort of internecine strife in the FSB ranks. Or maybe it had been payback for the screwing of the Bentley’s original owner. Or, or, and or.
10
I didn’t take a single note during the game, don’t recall anything that happened on the ice, not a player, not a play. I looked at the teams’ benches. Teams in the KHL always carry one or two poor eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds who sit through all but a couple of shifts in a game. They’re not waiting for the tap on their shoulders from coaches. They’re waiting for the next season, or maybe the one after that, when their time will come. They hope. I looked at those kids and thought of Dmitrov, who didn’t and shouldn’t have had to wait his turn, who had stepped right in and dominated. I remembered the buzz when we gambled on him. There had been doubts about Dmitrov even making it to the draft. Supposedly, two agents had bought him tickets for the flight to Minneapolis and those would-be representatives found out that Dmitrov’s iron-clad, cross-my-heart commitments weren’t worth shit. The agents cancelled the kid’s tickets and nulled and voided the kid’s rooms at the inn. An agent is willing to lie to a general manager, steal a player from another agent, and kiss ass until he chaps his lips, but he never appreciates being made to look like a chump. If a loan shark forgives one debt, he looks bad. If a player, especially a kid, suckers an agent, others will follow his lead and take liberties.
Dmitrov ended up making the trip on Ollie Buckhold’s tab and the relentlessly optimistic agent was telling people he was confident that “this great young man” would be playing in the league in October.
On the night of the draft the boys at our table were crossing out names on their list, circling ones that we hoped might be there at No. 22. It turned out that nineteen teams had taken a pass on Dmitrov and Columbus decided not to spend either of their two picks on a Russian. Hunts called us to order when our turn came round. “Do we want to do this?” he asked, his palms dampening his copy of the list. I nodded yes. Duke Avildsen, Chief, and I gave it a thumbs-up. So did the rest of the table except Dubinin. The lone No vote, he knew his dissent was meaningless but he registered it anyway.
Hunts and I marched on stage and Duke, Chief, and a grim-faced Dubinin brought up the rear. When Hunts stepped up to the mike and called Dmitrov’s name, the kid shot to his feet, shook Ollie’s hand, and took it on a dead run to the stage. Body language on draft day: this kid wanted to come to L.A, would have crawled up the hillside just to touch the Hollywood sign.
That was the same message he sent when Galvin hosted his post-draft party. He invited Dmitrov, Ollie, and a translator up to his suite at the arena that night. The caterers had laid out a five-star spread that had the kid bug-eyed and salivating.
“Should we put a weight-clause in his contract?” I said to Hunts as we waited for him to finally throw in his steak knife and fork.
“All that cutting,” Hunts said, “he’s going to get carpal tunnel if he keeps going like that.”
Dmitrov had laid waste to about three hundred bucks worth of prime Wagyu, Galvin’s steak of choice, starting rare and going rarer on the recommendation of the fellow who signed our cheques and, we hoped, would be signing the kid’s shortly.
When Dmitrov was finally sated and laid down his silverware in favour of his iPhone, the translator introduced him to my daughter. A decent judge of hockey talent and character herself, she came away singularly unimpressed. “Dad, you picked a kid who looks like he’s fifteen,” said she, a mature seventeen at the time.
“You saw him at the under-20s,” I said. “He was the most skilled player there as an underager, two years younger than almost all of them.”
“He looks like he should get a note from home to play,” she said.
Her reservations expressed and noted, my daughter raised no objections when the photographer arrived to shoot pics to be thrown up on the team’s website. She managed to wedge herself into one shot with Dmitrov and Galvin and another shot where she was talking to Dmitrov through the translator.
Our senior scouts took in the festivities, though with their contracts expiring in a few days, some worried that this might be their Last Dinner. They talked about squeezing in dental work and getting new pairs of glasses before July 1, while they still had coverage. Dubinin attended and seemed unconcerned about the team re-upping him. Still, he didn’t seem in the mood to celebrate. He didn’t say a word to Dmitrov. Dubinin did try to pick up a girl from the catering company. He brushed her hand when she dropped a mineral water in front of him and gave her the bedroom eyes. He flashed his watch at her: Tourbograph, the same German timepiece as Galvin’s. It meant nothing to her. Dubinin’s prey spent more time making eye contact with Dmitrov and seemed open to the idea of rocking his cradle.
For that one night, I allowed myself to think that, with Belov as a late pick, I had hit a homer that cleared the bases when everyone was looking for the bunt.
It all looked rosy.
It seemed like a long time ago now.
That had been a good night, a memory that occurred to me on the ride back to the Courtyard. Maybe I needed to remind myself what was at stake here. Maybe I just wanted to draw a lesson from the whole experience: that something so promising can go so wrong. Maybe I had just grown tired of watching for cars tailing us down the streets of Moscow. For whatever reason, I searched out the team website’s photo gallery of the event on my phone: Dmitrov smiling, Galvin holding court, Hunts wielding his soda water, me giving the photographer a dirty look out of habit.
I snapped out of this distant replay when my handheld pinged. Lee Siddon messaged me.
I’m going to be tied up for a while
I’ve tried that b4. Whatever U’re into I’m game
You’re so bad
U have no idea
Maybe some idea
U do whatever it is you have to do and keep me posted
OK
I have to go talk to a couple of coaches and scouts. Housekeeping.
Not true, but it would do in a pinch and this was exactly that.
I didn’t know how I was going to find Dmitrov. I had no idea how to snuff out a wrongful-death lawsuit against our team. I didn’t even want to consider the prospect that I might get fingered criminally on that count. That seemed implausible to me, but the Russians have a way of making the implausible the everyday. I wasn’t in a position to sit tight.
11
“I don’t know, Shadow. I’d be okay just going back to the hotel.”
It was one of those rare occasions when Marks could hear the little angels flapping their wings around him, singing righteously, and the little lawyers standing on one shoulder, snapping open their briefcases and whispering sage counsel in his ear.
