The Third Man In, page 9
I handled our bill, wildly inflated but there was no lodging a protest. I started to pull Marks away from the bar and thankfully the bartender couldn’t understand the colourfully profane insults Marks slurred at him. I looked over and saw the thugs filing over to the door. They weren’t congregating there to give us the Come Again Soon. Daria’s eyes followed Marks, Ivan, and me as we made for the exit. Horror registered on her face. She knew what was about to go down. The doormen took their cue and their coffee break at the time of our greatest need. Ivan found the situation chilly reading and walked ahead to his car without a backward glance, as if he had no idea who we were. We needed him to intercede but he wasn’t going to put his ass in the grinder. He had signed a contract to scout and this wasn’t in his job description. Ray was nowhere to be found. He had managed to stay in business catering to and not confronting the riffraff.
They were waiting for us at the door. The guy standing at the front looked like a third Klitschko brother. He was 6’7” if he was an inch. He was 270 if he was a pound. His hat size was 8¾ or 9 and any hat that he wore would have to have four sharp corners.
I forced a smile. I gulped. I held up a hand by way of greeting.
“Klaatu barada nikto,” I said.
It went over his enormous head.
“American pigs, old American pigs, you talk to Russian women, girls, you want to fuck,” he said. “You fuck yourself. You give us your money.”
“We’re not looking for trouble,” I said, handing over my cash. I held on to my plastic. My passport and papers and Marks’s were in the lining of my jacket, dropped through the hole in the inside pocket that served its purpose.
I decided not to ask to see their guns to determine that this was a stick-up. No sense accelerating things along to the worst possible conclusion. Marks had a few words in mind but couldn’t form them. He dug his hands into his pockets and then realized that he had given me his money and I was handing it over to them. I was going to tell him not to bother and started to turn halfway to do that. Later I thought how soft I was becoming in my middle age, soft enough to make the mistake of turning my head more than ninety degrees with my problems standing dead ahead.
The big guy’s thick fist crushed my temple. It knocked me backward into a wall but didn’t quite put me to sleep. Marks wound up on the ground with a guy who, mindful of the evolving tastes of the times, was crossing over from Greco-Roman wrestling to Mixed Martial Arts. I could hear Marks sputter as his opponent went for the choke-out. I thought that death by asphyxiation was going to be the second stage of the beat-down, the first being a broken neck.
Even if Ivan had stuck around, we would have been hopelessly outmanned. He had been the smartest man in the room when he fled. He hadn’t been the smartest when he had checked in, though, because he had trusted his car to valets who just happened to misplace it when we needed it for a getaway.
I ended up with the lead thug and spokesman. I had been in a couple of dozen hockey fights in my career but I was hardly a big-time fighter. It wasn’t my job. I didn’t mind getting my hands dirty but I hated the idea of ending up as dirt under somebody else’s fingernails. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what came to pass. I threw a right at the thinnest part of this thick-chested gym warrior: his chin. He ducked into a shot and I bounced one off his shaven dome. My school ring ended up cutting him, blood spilling down his short forehead like I had knocked over a pot of borscht. I say this with no pride and I felt none because, because, having smelled his own blood, he raised his game. He had trained in martial arts—tae kwon do would have been my bet because he went to the roundhouse off the hop and I never met a tae kwon do guy who wasn’t in love with his roundhouse. I was rusty, though, and I forgot the first rule of defence: crowd the wide kick. His Italian shoe was rising and so that took a little sting out of it, but it still landed like Neil Peart hitting the foot pedal on a bass drum. I was knocked dizzy but still on my feet.
Prayers were answered when Ray returned flanked by his doormen, all six of them. Hostilities died down and Marks was left flat on his back, moving only in spasms as he coughed and spat blood. I saw Daria behind Ray. She had asked him, begged him, to come out of his office.
“You should get out of here,” Ray said.
I agreed wholeheartedly.
The tae kwon do guy took out his Zippo lighter and the money I had given him. He set it on fire and threw it at my feet.
“Next time is worse,” he said.
I dragged Marks away.
“Look on the bright side, buddy, blood won’t stain that ugly fuckin’ jacket,” I told him.
A car wheeled up to the front door with Ivan in the back. A cab: something worth fighting for. Ivan swung the door open.
“I find car,” Ivan said. “No air in tires. Break windows. Other things.”
I’ll give credit where credit is due: These guys had seen us coming and left nothing to chance. Our bad luck to draw highly conscientious thugs.
2
Just before the cab rolled to a halt in front of the Courtyard, the cab driver pushed the button and locked the back doors. On top of the mileage and time we had to pay for our release, twice the price he quoted Ivan. Taken for a ride and taken hostage. It should have bothered me more than it did, but twenty minutes earlier I would have given a week’s pay for a clean getaway from the Boar’s Head.
Ivan was first out the door and onto the sidewalk. Marks slept and retched. When I pulled him out of the car and into the light, I saw that bruises were turning unflattering shades of blue and purple, clashing with his jacket. He had looked bad, then worse, and was going to be a wreck in the morning. Those things were going to pass. When I shook his eyes open, he wore the look of the defeated, though, and getting past that was no sure shot.
A pair of doormen employed by Marriott awaited us at the entrance of the Courtyard, the basic security for any Moscow hotel. They looked to be underdressed in drab suits with no overcoats, their swollen chests and guts testing the tensile strength of every button on their shirts. The two sides of beef walked around at three bills apiece. They would have come in useful as our tag-team partners back at the Boar’s Head.
When we arrived the pair were hassling a French businessman, a lothario who was trying to escort a leggy blond up to his room for a nightcap and maybe even a drink. Hotels in Moscow regard attractive Russian women of a certain sort as call girls without exception and Muscovites not cut of the right cloth will be regarded as grifters of one sort or another. Call it domestic self-loathing. Locals without clearance will be turned away at the door with prejudice, and in Russia they know from prejudice. Management doesn’t like the vibe that the place might be unsafe, a killer for business, and all it takes is for a couple of hookers and pimps to spike their marks’ drinks, rob them while drugged, and maybe run blackmail on them. Pepe’s call girl wouldn’t get one spiky heel inside the Marriott’s door and the boys enjoyed neutering another weak-assed foreigner.
Ivan took Marks’s one arm, I took the other, and the doormen did nothing more than nod at us. When we made it into the lobby, three jet-lagged scouts were sitting there, trading their tired war stories. When they caught a look at us, they laughed. I told them that Marks had been mugged. A story that had a crunchy truthful coating but chewy fudge at its centre. They laughed again and didn’t buy it for a second.
Even if they believed that Marks had been blameless for the jackpot we landed in, the story wouldn’t hold when gossiped second-hand and third. And by the time it got back to his boss in Vancouver, it would be even worse than it really was, clearing the very low bar for dismissal.
3
I made it to the hotel restaurant just as they were clearing the buffet. That made it 9:45 A.M. I begged the waitress for thirty seconds to load my plate. She was unimpressed until I gave her a tip in advance. I hoped the food would straighten me out. I had a near lethal dose of alcohol and curdled testosterone in my system.
Marks wasn’t at breakfast. I felt like hell so I could only imagine the state he was in. If he doesn’t surface by lunch, I thought, I’ll check in on him.
Ivan had managed to go home, explain his wanderings to his wife, express his misgivings, grab a couple of hours of shut-eye, wake, kiss the kids, cab back to the hotel, and beat me to the buffet. He was on his iPhone, wrapping up a call to his mechanic, who was going to check out what was left of Lada Samara. He was still talking but managed to wink when I sat down opposite him. He had taken the buffet as a personal challenge and had downed about a dozen scrambled eggs. I would make a point of not sitting behind him at the arena.
Ivan was breaking bread with Jaro Spacek, Detroit’s head Euro scout of twenty years. Ivan remembered being in grade school and watching Spacek skating with the Czechoslovaks against the great Soviet teams. Ivan gave him respect that wasn’t the least bit grudging. Spacek came along at the wrong time. In his prime a few managed to defect and make big money in North America, but the gates didn’t really open until he was in his mid- and late-thirties. Sparta Praha retired his number but that doesn’t pay the rent.
Once he was off his call, Ivan introduced me to Jaro and we did a Cold-Fish Handshake.
“You know Jaro, yes?” Ivan said.
“Yup,” I said.
Hunts was no friend or fan of Spacek’s boss in Detroit and a general enmity had filtered down to the teams’ staffs and become an accepted part of their cultures.
I looked up at the bank of three hi-def televisions a few tables away from us.
The one on the left was soundlessly tuned to a soccer game, God Knows Where vs. I Don’t Care. The big star for God Knows Where went down and lay motionless on the field like he’d been shot, although the replay showed that the guy getting thrown out of the game didn’t touch him.
The middle screen, also muted, was running a twenty-four-hour Russian news network that was working tributes to Dubinin into each half-hour block. There he was in a still that faded to black, the epitome of the Soviet sportsman with his Olympic medal draped over his neck, no smile, dead eyes.
The one on the right was tuned to CNN International out of London and the sound was up only to a whisper, drowned out by Russian Muzak, an awful reworking of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga.” Only when I looked around for a waitress to refill my coffee did I notice CNN’s Moscow correspondent was standing on Dubinin’s lawn in front of shards that used to be the Bentley dealership’s loaner. I flagged the waitress and she fetched the converter only in time for me to pull up the text display at the very end of the report:
Authorities say plans for a funeral with full state honours are in place and the matter remains under investigation. Reporting for CNN, Lee Siddon in Moscow.
I visualized a funeral, pillars of the Russian sports establishment in their places. And then I visualized one of those in a prominent place. Light bulb.
“Shit, I should go visit his widow,” I said.
Spacek hadn’t even looked up from the plate and didn’t notice me looking up at the screen. “Who?”
“Dubinin,” I said. “It would look pretty bad if I’m in Moscow and don’t put in an appearance.”
“Maybe I like to see where he die. I can take picture. Post on Facebook.”
Spacek held up his cellphone and pretended to take a photo of the site of the blast. I’m used to scouts’ gallows humour and I know where it comes from. All of us are retired players so we’ve already died once. Mourning one of our own isn’t a big deal, no teary wakes or anything like that. I was still playing for Spartak back in 2001 but it had to have rocked everyone in the league, especially in our organization, when two L.A. scouts were passengers in the plane out of Boston that was flown into the World Trade Center Tower No. 2. Good guys, liked by all, but everyone had games to work a couple of days later. I get that. I didn’t expect Jaro to weep, but I thought he might screw up a little respect even if it was, like mine, not heartfelt. I’m an admitted bastard and even I thought it was too soon.
“C’mon, he left a wife.”
“Is there child?”
“No kids,” I said. Not by His Missus, anyway. He had bragged once about fathering children on four continents. He had regarded them as gifts to their mothers, strands of his precious DNA. He had never given any of them a backward glance.
“There is no child, no being sad. He die, I no cry for him. Wife not sorry. Nobody sorry he die. I tell you story. I am boy with the tanks are in the streets of Praha, you know, in the year of ’68. I dream of those tanks every night as a boy. My father, he was a fighter. Not fighter like goon now. Not soldier. A fighter Czech way. He doesn’t throw bombs at the tanks. He says, ‘Polish do that…is not the Czech.’ My father does other thing. He stands in street when tanks go by. He smiles. He looks like stupid Czech. Some friends they cheer. But they move the signs on the streets of Praha. You know Praha is very hard city…”
Spacek took out a pen and on his paper placemat and he drew a tangle of lines that could pass for a section of the city’s labyrinthine grid.
“Soviets get lost. Soviets take tanks into streets that are too small. No way out for tanks. And tanks don’t go in the reverse. Soviets come and they are all stuck. My father tells me, ‘Like Soldier Svejk, Czech danger when he work with you, not against.’ Father tells me, ‘Fight not so good as think, brain better than gun.’ You know, is true, but those years I have bad dreams about tanks. Maybe even now.”
As it turned out, Spacek didn’t have problems with the average Russian guy. He had no trouble sitting down with Ivan. It wasn’t Russians, just the Russian elite. There weren’t many working in the game, but you’d put Dubinin at the top of the list.
“Dubinin is this,” Spacek said, touching an invisible cravat. “Silk scarf, yes, what they say about him. We are not good enough. This he thinks. You think same, don’t you, Shade?”
“He worked for me, that’s all,” I said. “Show some respect. It’s the decent thing to do.”
Spacek laughed. I didn’t fool him. Everyone in the business knew about Dubinin busting my face wide open. Nobody in the business would have wanted to work for him and on the ice and being his boss would have been worse than that.
I didn’t go into it but Spacek had nailed it: he knew Dubinin had been infected with the worst kind of conceit.
Dubinin was a couple of years older than me but imagined himself to be ten, maybe fifteen years younger. With that delusion he’d have fit right in Hollywood. He megadosed vitamins. I was once behind him in a line at the airport where our carry-ons were passing through X-ray inspection. Dubinin was pulled aside and asked to dump out a bag that contained fifty vials of pills and gels, not to mention some designer aesthetic facial products. The latter wouldn’t be wasted on his wife or a mistress of any rank. He considered himself the best advertisement for a workout regimen and diet created by a medical guru who had worked with top Russian athletes, everything from world champion pole vaulters to pro boxers.
“You must do this, my friend,” he said, getting two things wrong in just six words.
I had told him I don’t do cults. He once tried to sell our Czech scout, Tomas, on the program, and Tomas, a 270-pounder with push-broom eyebrows, didn’t even look up as he popped a pickled egg and washed it down whole with a tallboy of Pilsner Urquell.
4
I found a photo shop down the street from the Marriott. I would have walked right by it but a gallery of game-action shots, soccer and hockey, lined its storefront window. That prompted me to return to the idea of a gift for the Belovs, a photo of Sergei in better times.
A pale, long-haired kid who was studying film at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography stood behind the counter. He had a tattoo of a dagger dripping blood poking out the end of his shirt sleeve and another more elaborate number creeping up through the collar of a ragged sweater that he wore overtop. It seemed he had spent a lot less time studying the films of Eisenstein than more recent classics.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“You are American, yes? And you must know Die Hard, Die Hard II, Live Free and Die Hard? This is more art than the person thinks.”
I looked behind the counter and spotted a stack of English-language books topped by a well-thumbed edition of Roger Ebert’s best, a Hitchcock bio, and The Kid Stays in the Picture.
I cut to the point, which was a specific, smaller piece of art. I told the Cinephile that I needed a photo reproduced and framed for the family of this kid who had died, without any pyrotechnics or special effects.
“Maybe high res?” he asked.
“Just do whatever you can do. It’s a photo of a hockey player. Kid with Magnitogorsk. KHL.”
“Is boy who die?”
I nodded. The story must be making the rounds, I thought. It turned out that the Photo-Mart Hipster got the news through word of mouth.
“My uncle was at game, works in the arena,” he said. “Many games. He there that day. Sometimes I work, photographs, how you say…without job?”
“Freelance.”
“Yes, I do this at games for newspaper sometimes yes, sometimes no,” he said. He pointed to an action shot at ice level, elbows up, and a guy with Red Army giving the Plexiglas a toothless kiss.
“You weren’t at the game when the kid died?”
“No. Nobody pay, so I don’t go. But I talk to a friend who does television at that game. Technician. We got to school together when young. Now he is camera at glass. He tells me this. Everything. Is sad thing, yes?”
