Dead Man's Rule (15 page)

At 1:35 a.m., the living room of the apartment was dark and silent. The remains of a Chinese takeout dinner sat on the coffee table between the leather sofa and the large TV, sharing space with several sports and news magazines. A Russian novel was propped open on one arm of the sofa, and the previous day’s newspaper lay strewn on the cushions of the matching love seat.

A scratching noise outside the window broke the late-night stillness. A dark shape crouched on the landing of the fire escape, bent over a small metal tool similar to the slim-jim device that tow-truck operators use to unlock car doors. The thin strip of metal appeared on the inside of the window just under the latch. It slowly moved up, pushing the latch open. The intruder removed the jimmy and eased the window open an inch. It creaked softly but audibly, so he took out a small aerosol can of oil and sprayed the hinges of the old-fashioned window. After a moment the window started to open again, this time soundlessly.

The shadowy figure popped out the screen, slipped through the open window, and dropped lightly to the floor. He was dressed all in black and wore a black ski mask. At his waist, he wore a belt lined with small pouches. A compact holster with a small pistol was strapped to his right thigh and a sheathed knife was on the left.

Drawing his gun, the man started across the room, hugging the wall as he cautiously made his way out of the living room and down the short hallway. A door stood half-open at the end of the hall, and the dark figure watched it closely as he edged forward. He stood outside the door for several seconds, listening. The stillness was disturbed only by a soft snoring and the faint sounds of the street outside. He looked inside and saw a man lying on his back in a large bed in the middle of the room, his sleeping face lit by the faint moonlight coming in through the window.

The intruder smiled in the darkness and put away his gun. The target had been positively identified, and he was alone and fast asleep. This would be quieter—and more satisfying—with the knife. As he pulled out the long, sharp blade and stepped toward the bed, a floorboard squeaked loudly under his foot.

The target lifted his head off the pillow and caught sight of the intruder in his bedroom. For an instant, both men froze. Then the intruder launched himself toward the bed, his knife aimed at the other man’s throat. The man in the bed gave a wordless shout as he rolled onto the floor, his hand feeling for a gun on the bedside table. In his haste and groggy clumsiness, he knocked it off and it fell to the floor with a loud thunk.

The intruder scrambled across the bed and slashed wildly at the figure on the floor. The other man grabbed the intruder’s knife arm and pulled him down, slamming his hand into the bed frame. The knife fell to the floor, and the two men grunted and cursed as they struggled in the narrow space between the bed and the wall.

The intruder landed a solid blow to the other man’s head and broke free. He reached for his gun, but the holster was empty. The pistol must have fallen out during the struggle. He looked around wildly and saw the knife on the floor behind him. He grabbed it and lunged at his enemy.

A flash and a loud bang broke the dark stillness of the night. A burst of sparks flew from the knife and the intruder cried out as pain shot up his right arm. He staggered back, then turned and ran. A second shot just missed him as he sprinted out of the bedroom. He raced across the living room and dove out the window. He heard a third shot reverberate above him as he slid down the fire escape. Simultaneously, a searing pain blossomed in his left arm as the bullet tore through his triceps. He fell as he reached the ground, and rolled under the edge of the second-floor balcony. Staggering to his feet, he ran to his waiting car to nurse his wounds and fight again another day.

Back in the apartment, Sergei Spassky sat shaking on the floor. He had been fine until he got off the phone with the police. There had been things he needed to do, people he needed to talk to. But now he could only sit and wait and reflect on what had just happened—and what could have happened. He fingered the deep scratch that stretched from his sternum to his left shoulder and did his best not to imagine what it would have felt like to wake up to a knife plunging into his chest. He glanced at the windows and swallowed hard, though he was virtually certain the assassin was long gone.

He decided to do some informal crime-scene investigation to take his mind off of gruesome could-have-beens. Beretta in hand, he got up and walked down the hall, making sure not to disturb anything for the professionals who would arrive in a few minutes. He noticed with grim satisfaction that there were drops of blood on the floor.

He got down on his hands and knees to look at the gun and knife that lay on his bedroom floor. The gun was a Glock 23—a small, reliable, high-powered pistol. Sergei looked at it for only a few seconds; it told him nothing except that his attacker knew handguns.

The knife was more interesting. It was a long fighting knife with a dagger point and a keen edge that ran the length of the blade and partway along the top. It looked like a
Spetsnaz
commando knife, but it wasn’t. Sergei was pretty sure that the Soviet military had never used handcrafted leather grips, and the blade appeared to be a custom high-carbon steel alloy. It was a beautiful knife; the only flaw was a large black dent in the grip and finger guard. Using a pencil, Sergei turned the knife over to get a better look. The dent appeared to be fresh. Sergei smiled coldly as he realized that it must have been caused by one of his shots. “I’ll bet that hurt,” he murmured.

He glanced around the room to see if his attacker had left anything else behind. A small black object in the corner caught his eye. After half a second, his mind identified it as the finger of a black glove. He crouched down for a closer look. The assassin’s finger was still inside. Sergei flinched back, then stood staring down at the severed digit. His smile returned as the shock faded and he started thinking like a detective again.
You were careful not to leave any fingerprints, but you couldn’t help leaving a finger—and it’ll point straight back to you.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

O
PENING
S
TATEMENTS

“Any luck?” Ben asked.

“Not yet,” Sergei admitted. “I can’t find him anywhere. He’s not returning calls, his apartment seems to be empty, and I haven’t seen him around the Brothers’ building.”

Ben leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “I thought you said he was going to testify. What happened?”

“I don’t know. I talked to him in the restaurant. Then he called me half an hour later and said he thought we could do business. He said he’d make me an offer, but he never did. These
mafiya
types disappear all the time for all sorts of reasons.”

“Well, is there anything you can do to find him?” Ben asked, frustration creeping into his voice. “Trial starts tomorrow, and I need him to testify—and I need you to make finding this guy your highest priority.”

Sergei looked down at his notes. Candidly, he knew he should have followed up on this sooner than he had. He had viewed the matter as basically closed once Josef had called him, and he had allowed other matters (particularly the intruder who had nearly killed him) to occupy his attention for most of the past two days. It wasn’t until yesterday evening—more than forty-eight hours after Josef’s phone call—that he’d begun trying to find the man. “I’ll keep on it. I know you need him by tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Don’t stop looking if you haven’t found him by then. That’s when our trial technically starts, but there’ll probably be some motion practice and procedural arguing for most of the morning. I can also put on other witnesses for a while to delay things, if need be. But I will need him, and the sooner the better. Without Josef Fedorov, we’re dead.”

By three o’clock that afternoon, Ben’s conference-room table was completely covered with paper. Noelle had spent most of the afternoon in the file room making copies of potential exhibits. Dr. Ivanovsky had dropped by after lunch, and for once Ben was glad to see him—the doctor was now checking the copies for missing pages and organizing them into neat stacks at one end of the table.

Ben sat at the other end, working on his opening statement. He murmured to himself in the middle of an untidy ring of court filings, deposition transcripts, scribbled notes, and accordion files of document productions, all liberally sprinkled with hundreds of annotated Post-its. He bent over a notepad bearing the latest outline of his statement, muttering and gesturing to an imaginary courtroom. Occasionally, he would fall silent and scribble on his pad or dig through a pile of papers for a document that had suddenly become important to his thinking.

Dr. Ivanovsky was careful not to disturb Ben with questions or suggestions. Indeed, he did not even feel tempted. It reassured him to see Ben at work. He looked like a scientist.

Sergei’s tail was gone. Or, more likely, his old tail had been replaced. Sergei wasn’t particularly surprised—it wasn’t unusual for surveillance operatives to be rotated, particularly when they were observing a cautious subject. Still, it was unnerving. Sergei thought about using the Petrograd trick again, but he didn’t have time to do that
and
find Josef. All he could do was try some countersurveillance techniques and try to ignore the feeling that someone was watching him.

Sergei decided that his best bet was to maintain a constant vigil of Josef’s apartment and his car, which was parked directly below the apartment. If Josef was still in the area, he would probably come home—or at least come for his car—at some point. But by midnight, he still had not shown himself, and Sergei was beginning to doubt that he would.

It was time to take a risk. Sergei slipped across the street and into the parking lot. He approached Josef’s car, staying out of the glow cast by the streetlights as much as possible. Fortunately, the car was in a dark corner of the lot. Sergei pulled out a small flashlight and played its beam over the interior of the car. A briefcase lay on the front passenger seat.

That was strange. Why would he leave his briefcase in his car?

He tried the door. It was unlocked. He got in and quickly searched through the briefcase. It contained a three-day-old newspaper, Sergei’s business card, some documents related to what appeared to be a deal to import beluga caviar, a travel itinerary for a flight to Russia leaving two days ago and returning tomorrow, and Josef’s passport. It took Sergei a few seconds to realize what that probably meant. He searched the rest of the car at a more leisurely pace, but found nothing relevant to the
Ivanovsky
case.

When he got back to his office, he dug out Ben Corbin’s home number and called him, despite the fact that it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. After five rings, a groggy voice said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Ben, it’s Sergei. Sorry to call you so late, but I just found out something you should know about. I don’t think Josef Fedorov will be testifying at trial.”

“Why not?”

“It looks like someone got to him before we did. My guess is that he’s dead.”

Promptly at nine o’clock, Ben stepped up to the podium, arranged his notes, and surveyed the courtroom. Directly in front of him, Judge Harris sat in a tall black chair behind his massive wooden bench, flanked by his clerk and bailiff. A court reporter sat on a small chair just in front of the bench, typing silently on her stenographic machine. Anthony Simeon and Janet Anderson were at the counsel table to Ben’s right, and three of the Brothers (Dmitry, Anton, and Pavel) sat immediately behind them in the first row of seats. Noelle sat at the counsel table to the left of the podium, surrounded by boxes of neatly organized exhibits. Dr. Ivanovsky fidgeted nervously in the first row, and an elderly woman in a long Slavic-looking dress and practical shoes sat next to him. He had introduced her to the Corbins as his wife, a fact they had already guessed. Her name was Irina, and she had a friendly smile and very limited English.

Ben looked the judge in the eye and smiled with a confidence he did not feel. “Good morning, Your Honor. As the Court knows, opening statement is my opportunity to tell you what the facts will show. I am here this morning to present evidence, not argument.”

“Which is all that the law or I will permit you to do in opening statement,” Judge Harris interjected dryly.

“Yes, Your Honor, but the facts themselves argue more eloquently than I ever could. This is a case about a broken contract. You will hear Dr. Mikhail Ivanovsky”—he gestured to his client with his left hand—“testify that on October seven, he and Nikolai Zinoviev negotiated for the sale of the contents of safe-deposit box 4613 at the LaSalle Street branch of American Union Bank. He will further testify that he gathered $5,000 on two hours’ notice and delivered that money to Mr. Zinoviev—testimony that will be corroborated by Mr. Zinoviev’s bank records and his testimony in this room at the TRO hearing last month. The Court’s earlier rulings will not allow my client to testify as to what happened next, but he doesn’t need to. The only inference that can reasonably be drawn from these undisputed facts is that—”

“Objection, argument,” interrupted Simeon.

“Sustained.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Ben said. Judge Harris was apparently going to keep him on a short leash despite the absence of a jury. Ben made a mental note to omit the potentially argumentative portions of his opening. “Furthermore,” he continued, moving to his next point, “evidence from Mr. Zinoviev’s own colleagues”—he pointed to the Brothers—“will independently prove the existence of this contract. They met with Mr. Zinoviev on October nine of this year to discuss a business proposal. And it so happens that they took minutes at that meeting.” Ben took out an enlarged copy of the minutes and put it on an easel. “In the very first paragraph it says—”

“Objection,” said Janet Anderson. “This document is a forgery, Your Honor. We—” Simeon put his hand on her arm, and she stopped.

“That may be a valid objection if and when Mr. Corbin moves for the admission of this exhibit into evidence,” said the judge. “He hasn’t done that yet. If you disagree with his version of the facts, tell me your own version in your opening. Don’t interrupt his. Objection overruled.”

Ben smiled inwardly as his adversary sat in red-faced silence. “Thank you, Your Honor. The first paragraph of these minutes states that the purpose of this meeting was to discuss the purchase of the contents of the very same safe-deposit box that Mr. Zinoviev had already sold to Dr. Ivanovsky.

“The second paragraph says that they agreed on a purchase price of $100,000, ‘conditioned on a representative of the Company inspecting the contents of the box and deeming them satisfactory.’ We know from Mr. Zinoviev’s earlier testimony that he did in fact show the Brothers the contents of the box and that they agreed to pay him $100,000. We also have the contract that they signed with him.

“But what’s
not
in the contract is the last paragraph of these minutes, which I’ve highlighted in yellow here: ‘Mr. Zinoviev disclosed to the Members of the Company that he had entered into a prior agreement to sell the contents of the box to a third party. He agreed that he would be solely responsible for obtaining the release of any obligations under that agreement. He further agreed that payment of the purchase price was conditioned on his delivering full and clear title to the contents of the box.’” Ben paused. “Mr. Zinoviev never received that purchase price. Why not? Because he could not deliver ‘full and clear title to the contents of the box.’ And why couldn’t he deliver that title? Because he had already sold it to Dr. Ivanovsky.

“Mr. Zinoviev no doubt developed a severe case of seller’s remorse when he realized that he had sold for $5,000 what he could have sold for $100,000. That gave him a powerful motive to trample on Dr. Ivanovsky’s rights, but not the legal ability to do so. We ask the Court to vindicate those rights. Thank you, Your Honor.”

Sergei shifted uncomfortably in the metal-and-plastic chair in front of Elena Kamenev’s well-used steel desk. Elena sat across from him, mostly hidden by a bulky old computer monitor and several piles of paper. If she hadn’t been tall—about five foot nine—she probably wouldn’t have been visible at all. As it was, all Sergei could see was the top of her blonde head, her concentration-wrinkled forehead, and her brown eyes focused intently on the screen in front of her.