The Third Man In, page 23
“You’re in the land of unreliable sources,” I said. “It’s a wonder that you can get anything on air at all.”
“So why are you going down this road?”
I felt like I had better come clean with Lee.
“I think I saw him on the subway when I left your place the other morning.”
“Him? Markov?”
“Dubinin.” And I described what I saw. There One Second Gone the Next. No sense going from orange to red alert. And I didn’t tell her that I saw him in flesh up close before dawn. I didn’t mention the fight or the gun. I left him as an apparition.
“Were you drinking when you saw him?” she asked.
“I don’t remember ever being sober.”
16
When I saw Sherlock Holmes holding his pipe with eyes skyward envisioning a perfect solution and Dr. Watson sitting up on a stone bench braced for another amazement, I knew that I had the right place. Lee Siddon had drawn out a map for me to the Arabat District and to No. 10 Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya. The embassy’s architecture was all Soviet-era but the two statues were Sun Never Sets on the British Empire. As it turns out, Russian diplomats made a gift of the statues of Holmes and Watson a few years back.
“Their generosity was only outstripped by their sense of irony, I suppose,” Trevor Parry said, leaning back at his desk in a corner office that overlooked Holmes, Watson, and the Moskva River. “The Russians, not one of them believes in the ingenuity of the British. They see it as self-congratulation, delusion. They don’t admire us for anything at all. They’ve just valued some of our number in the past for their moral pliability.”
My trip to the embassy wasn’t educational. I was a student of history, so my degree says, but I had no interest in a lesson on Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five. This visit was only as social as necessary. I didn’t dive deep into l’affaire Dubinin with Parry, but I did sketch out how I had a player who wanted out of Russia. And I told him that I could get it done on a quid pro quo.
“You’ve tried the Canadians?”
“No, that came up in the discussions I had with him. Not Canada. He didn’t seem willing to budge on that.”
“And the U.S.?”
“I imagine that it would be a brick wall. One that you might be able to knock down over time but not fast enough. At least for him.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re quite right.”
Parry paged Murdoch Martyn by text.
“It might seem quite easy from your perspective,” Parry said.
“No, I don’t think it’s easy but I think it could be in your interests,” I said. “You talked about the ‘clawback.’ This would be a hell of a clawful.”
“There’s no denying that,” Parry said.
Martyn walked in.
“Oh yes, you’re the gent from the club the other night,” he said. “The hockey player.”
“Scout, was a player, now a scout,” I said.
Parry jumped in, cutting off any social chatter to get to the business at hand.
“Our new friend is quite the scout, it seems,” Parry said. “He has a fellow who is interested in moving to England.”
“Imagine quite a few do,” Martyn said. “A player then? Not much call for them in the U.K., I’m afraid.”
“A player in a much bigger sense,” Parry said. “A player with several billion dollars at his disposal.”
“What’s that?” Martyn did, doing a double take.
“Starshnikov,” Parry said. The famous name snapped Martyn to attention. “It seems Starshnikov wants to move to London. Bit of an Anglophile, I believe, what with the tabs and the like.”
“Not to mention his daughter and Wimbledon,” I said.
I took them on a small side trip, a bit of a human element that might soften them just the tiniest bit, to reach below their Upper Crustedness and draw on their sympathies for the less fortunate. Not myself, mind you, and certainly not Starshnikov.
“I need Starshnikov to sign a transfer document that will allow a young player, Dmitrov, to play in L.A.,” I said. “If Starshnikov doesn’t give me this paperwork, the kid’s release from his contract, something we file with the International Hockey Federation, then he can’t play for us.”
“Is this boy worth all the trouble?” Martyn asked reasonably.
“Seems he’s a prodigy,” Parry said. “Nineteen, a genius, already making millions.”
I thought of what Duke Avildsen said about Dmitrov: “That boy is so fast he’d be up your ass and out your ear before you knew it.” I didn’t bother with this scouting report for Parry and Martyn.
“Not exactly hard done by, no candidate for refugee status,” Martyn said.
“Oppressed in his own way,” I said. “They’ve put him on steroids against his will.”
“His team did?”
“The boys from Dynamo did,” I said. They both understood exactly what Dynamo stood for in Russian society and knew the history of the sports club, not the hockey but the soccer. Excuse me, football.
“He plays for Moscow Dynamo then?” Martyn asked.
“Dynamo is squeezing Starishnikov, the owner of the Magnitogorsk team, to trade the kid,” I said. “He’s already feeling pressure from FSB boys. About this. About travel. About his finances.”
“The walls are closing in on your billionaire friend and the leash is being pulled on the very tight collar of the teenager, as it were,” Parry said.
“Starshnikov told me he’ll sign the release if he can secure British citizenship,” I said. “He has a travel visa in place. Got it already to see his daughter play in international tournaments. Getting him to Britain isn’t the hard part. He just wants to have a guarantee…”
Martyn cut me off. Here came the cold water. Not just enough to dampen my hopes, enough to submerge them. “We don’t work in guarantees like that,” he said. “We’re in a sensitive position here, of course. Something like this, well, it can upset the balance of relations between our two countries. And in modern-day Russia this new governing class could teach the Sicilians graduate courses in vendetta.”
“ ‘Sensitive’? How sensitive was it when you’ve let other Russians in? You’ve done it before.”
“True, but that goes to the point,” Martyn said. “This might be troublesome for our Russians.”
I don’t know exactly what I said at that point, some variation on Huh, What, and What the Fuck. I might have even stuttered.
Martyn carried on. “Well, we have a few Russians that we’ve approved, the clawback, you know.”
“And you’re worried about what they’ll think? Why’s it trouble for them? What dog do they have in this fight?”
“Well, they’re British citizens now, of course. But they have…how would you put it?”
“History, I suppose,” Parry put it.
“Yes,” Martyn said. “History, history and enduring friendships. With Moscow, of course. And everything that goes with Moscow, you know. The power structure.”
“That is to say, these new citizens of our country have at least a toe firmly planted in their nation of origin.”
My head was spinning. “Let me get this right,” I said. “So you’re not just afraid of offending Moscow…”
“ ‘Afraid’ is a dreadful word,” Martyn said. “Let’s just say sensitive to.”
“Okay, you’re ‘sensitive’ to Moscow but also to a few billionaires who are operating for Moscow in the U.K. with paperwork you’ve granted them.”
“I’m afraid there’s no ignoring their sphere of influence,” Parry said. “It would make things very delicate. They own the media. Politically they have the ears of some officials well-placed in the civil service, not to mention Parliament. Any one of them could organize a bit of opposition somewhere along the line and make it all impractical at best, impossible perhaps, and without a doubt something that could not be fast-tracked—what your friend is looking for.”
Not that I thought of him as a friend or even an ally. Just another guy in a jam.
“Leave this with us,” Martyn said. “Maybe there’s a soft spot in this.”
I wanted to ask if they were going to loop in anyone else on this little conversation but in an embassy I was operating on the assumption that the walls have ears. Sets of them.
“He could go and take his chances with an application when he arrived,” Parry said.
“I dunno if that will fly with him,” I said. “I met him in a church but he doesn’t seem like a guy who believes in the power of prayer.”
“We can do our best,” Martyn said. “It will be weeks in the process, months more like it.”
“Not good,” I said. “I’m out of here the day after tomorrow. I hope, anyway.”
“We can phone about,” Martyn said in his best High Dreadfully Sorry. “There’s nothing we can do here in this office to make that happen for you, I’m afraid.”
“But you’ll try?” I asked, not quite pleading.
They nodded.
“There are no holes to crawl through here, I’m afraid,” Parry said. “Very complicated at a diplomatic level. Especially strained these days between the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation. An uneasy peace. Something like this would be considered a provocative action.”
My head sagged. I could feel the blood rush in my ear.
“All that said, there are options to investigate,” Murdoch Martyn said. “We’re not the only shop on the boulevard. We have friends. Some you might not know about. We can make some calls. It’s not like he’s a fugitive worried about extradition laws like Snowden…”
“If he writes a cheque large enough, he might be able to land a condo in Vatican City,” I said.
“It’s the speed of process that’s a concern,” Parry said. “Not to get your hopes sky high, no guarantees, I’m afraid.”
“It‘s a transaction but a complicated one,” Martyn said. “More than a buyer and seller, as it were. All we can try to do is call in a favour.”
I gave them the necessary contact info. I was worried that they weren’t willing to spend one of their big chips on a guy they’d met over a drink forty-eight hours before. I was worried that they wouldn’t spend the thinnest chip in their stack. I moved on to more immediate crises.
“I’m probably going to get pinched when I get back to the hotel,” I said. “I’ve been staying away. I’m pretty sure that I haven’t been tailed, but eventually I have to go back there…”
Martyn jumped in. “Facing the music,” he said. “The price of doing business, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, it’s an uncomfortable prospect, but that we know this could happen is a good thing,” Parry said. “If we don’t hear from you when you go back there, then we’ll know that you’ve been detained and you’re being investigated. And we can try to help if that’s the case.”
Try had never sounded so hollow before.
17
I took a deep gulp when I made the turn at the top of the block and the sign for the Marriott came into view. I didn’t see any signs of an FSB detail around the hotel. No unmarked vans. No cars with smoked-glass windows. No guys loitering and peering out from behind copies of Pravda. My heart pounded. The doormen looked me over. I thought they were going to grab me. They just nodded. Am I getting slow-played?
I made it into the lobby. Nobody was waiting for me, and I didn’t attract anybody’s attention. Herve Daigle, the Winnipeg scouting director, was sitting in the lobby by his lonesome, so I walked over. Stick around someone else and you’re harder to pinch. Make sure that someone has spotted you.
“Hey, Herve, have you seen Marks?”
“Kelly Markham? That piss tank?” he said. “No.”
Herve was no great conversationalist. I stretched this chat as much as I could.
“If you see him, tell him I’m around. He wanted some sleeping pills and I got a prescription filled at the drugstore. He was pretty beat-up.”
“Never thought he had trouble sleeping. Just trouble waking up.”
I forced a smile. “Thanks,” I said and rolled my eyes on the way to the elevator.
I told the girl at the front desk that I had lost my room key. She asked my name and looked it up on the terminal. I was surprised but not bothered by the fact that she didn’t dig out my passport and paperwork. She just shot me a disapproving look and gave me an updated plastic room key. I thanked her but she kept her head down and gave me not a single civil word. Par for the course.
I had things to do. Sleeping was at the top of the list. I swiped my card and walked into my room. Before I even had a chance to turn on the light I realized that I wasn’t going to be sleeping for a while, not with the guy pointing a gun at me.
18
He held it in his right hand, his arm straight out in front of him. He aimed it between my eyebrows and hairline. In his left hand, waist high, he held a high-powered flashlight. My pupils shrank and I could only make out sketchy details of his face. He was fair, even pale. His face had the right-angled geometry of Russian grills. He seemed to be clean-shaven but he might have been one of those baby-faced Russians who can’t grow a beard at all. But if you wanted me to pick him out of a line-up after the fact, it would have been no dice.
“Okay, my hands are up.”
He pointed to the chair.
“You’re the boss.”
I squinted but didn’t take my eyes off him. I felt around for the chair opposite the television. He shone a beam on the television remote on the table beside the chair.
He pointed to the TV and then the remote beside it.
I didn’t waste any time. I lowered my right hand, grabbed the remote, and hit the Power button. A Russian-language channel came up. I raised my right hand again, still holding the remote.
I didn’t look around the room. I didn’t know for a fact that he was alone in there. I almost didn’t want to know.
With television on and the sound at five on the dial, he became a little chattier.
“Change television,” he said and I did. He only seemed happy when it landed on CNN. An English-language channel would have been what a foreigner like me would be watching. No rousing suspicions this way, I guessed.
“Volume,” he said. I turned it up to eight or nine on the dial, as loud as it could be without drawing complaints from neighbouring rooms.
“What you have done is very clever,” he said in something just above a whisper as a British Airways ad blared in the background. “Brilliant, perhaps.”
“If I’m so brilliant…”
He motioned with his left hand, putting the flashlight to his lips, shushing me. I dropped it to a whisper.
“…then why am I in shit up to my neck? Why is my scout dead, one prospect dead, and the kid I came here for not leaving Russia? It hasn’t been much of a vacation.”
“Perhaps.”
His heavy coat was thrown on my bed. My bed was stripped down. My room was tossed. Not that there was anything here.
“You travel without a phone and computer?”
I had left my computer in Ivan’s car. If they hadn’t already bugged it, I wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
“Stolen. Got drunk at the Boar’s Head. Got beaten up there too.”
I still had my hands and the remote over my head but I turned my left hand to show him the gash. He could see the lumps on my face.
“Sad for you, sad for me, to be in this place without your technology,” he said.
“I’m sure you can find it on the black market.”
“You become invisible without your little toys, no?”
“It makes it hard to stay in touch.”
“Please, lower your hands,” my uninvited guest said. “You are comfortable now?”
“I make a living,” I said.
He didn’t get it but carried on anyway. He decided to turn over his cards and show me his hand. He might have been a government-approved thug, but he revealed himself as a righteous one.
“I have followed you these days. I have also followed Dubinin. I know what happened. I saw this, what you did to his arm and you take his gun.”
“And you didn’t help out?”
“No.”
“And you told the FSB boys what happened?”
“No.”
“He did, though, right?”
“No, he is shamed. I contact him directly. He does not know that I am following. He does not know the things I am knowing. I ask for report and he says nothing. Losing gun, he is shamed.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“You know Dubinin from hockey. I know him from Dynamo, other places. I know you do not like Dubinin. You wouldn’t, no? That is just sport or your business. I am like many. I do not like Dubinin. I know about the women, the money. I know he does things others cannot do, no?”
He went on. His list of grievances catalogued Dubinin’s sense of entitlement that had come with birthright.
“Dubinin is ‘the special one’ for powerful men but that is years ago,” he said. “Things change. Not so many now, I think. Now just a few.”
And after a few more stops and starts, history swirled with resentments, the picture came into focus: Dubinin’s support in the FSB and elsewhere in the corridors of power was far from unanimous. Even his peers were tired of his act and some or even most of his superiors were leaning that way. But that was only what this one operator owned up to, the story he was spinning. Looking back now, I’d bet that he was one of the legion that Dubinin had screwed over. In other situations I’d bet that money was at the root of it and I’d still guarantee that hard currency was in the mix. This seemed to run deeper. Dubinin had done this guy wrong. I was in no position to ask him about it, mind you. I wasn’t going to pick at a wound, fresh or old, of a guy pointing a gun at me.
“What does he do for you…the team?” he asked me.
I told him straight up that I had wanted to fire Dubinin since the team hired me. I told him that I had wanted to fire him even if we managed to get Dmitrov out of Russia. And I also told him that firing him wasn’t just my call. I had superiors too. I could only make my case and get approval from upstairs. From the minute change in his expression, I could tell that he recognized that position.
