Last to Fold (5 page)

Buying one the first time I lived here, in 1977 as a junior officer in the KGB’s New York
rezindentura,
was both impractical and a quick way to end my career. When I returned in 1993 as a private citizen, I had no such constraints. I found one in Florida, with low mileage and no rust, flew to Tampa that afternoon, and drove it home. On the way, I christened it
Potemkin,
after the mutinous battleship made famous by Eisenstein’s classic film. More Russian humor.

I took the FDR downtown, got off at Water Street, and was immediately mired in traffic. Driving any car in New York is silly, but driving a boat the size of the
Potemkin
is a juvenile indulgence, one that almost makes up for a childhood without toys. I crawled the three blocks to my garage, raised the top, and reluctantly turned the Eldo over to José, the day manager, who takes care of it as if it were his own. Then I went up to the office to learn what my ex-wife had been up to for the last twenty years.

CHAPTER 5

Everything was quiet except for the hum of air-conditioning and computer fans, and Pig Pen. We rent the twenty-eighth floor of a nondescript steel-and-glass tower at Pine and Water. It’s about twenty times more space than I need, but Foos and the Basilisk require room, mainly the Basilisk.

The space is actually cheap. We got a great deal on a long-term lease in the wake of 9/11 when no one wanted to work downtown. I already lived on South Street, so I looked at the location as a plus. Foos lives in Brooklyn and never goes above Fourteenth Street, unless it’s an emergency. We’ve got million-dollar views of Wall Street, New York Harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty as a bonus.

I made my way through the banks of computer servers that separate the reception area from the rest of the space. Twelve floor-to-ceiling rows, each forty feet long with four-foot aisles in between. They sit on a raised floor under which run miles of cable and supplemental cooling ducts. Sometimes, when I want to lose myself in a problem, I pace the aisles in the dim light and the white noise of the fans. It’s a kind of alternative reality, a desert canyon of electronic intelligence. When I sense the machines trying to speak to me, I turn on the lights or leave.

Behind the server farm is a large open area with two seating arrangements—one organized like a living room, the other a big conference table and a dozen chairs. Around the perimeter are a dozen glassed-in offices and conference rooms, one each for me, Foos, and Pig Pen, and the rest for visitors we rarely have. Foos has converted a second office into sleeping quarters. He says he likes to work nights, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he moved in permanently. I prefer to leave work behind at the end of the day.

“Hello, Russky,” a large African gray parrot squawked from the office he calls home. “Pizza?”

His favorite food, which Foos indulges him, and he thinks everyone else should follow suit. He primarily likes the crust, but lately he’s developed a taste for anchovies. Lombardi’s in SoHo is his favorite.

“No dice. You’re already overweight, Pig Pen,” I said. “Not good for a parrot. Makes you look like a vulture with a dye job.”

He considered that for a moment, realization dawning that I wasn’t carrying the flat cardboard box that contains culinary nirvana. He muttered something I couldn’t catch, maybe a new word he was working on, and kept one eye on me while he gnawed, if that’s what parrots do, on the metal mesh of the cage that encloses his office.

“Pizza!” he tried again. He’s nothing if not persistent. Parrots don’t have lips, of course, which makes
p
a difficult letter to pronounce, something Foos didn’t consider when he named Pig Pen after the late drummer of his favorite rock band. “Pizza” comes out more like “rizza,” but we have no trouble understanding what he wants.

“Pig Pen Parrot picks a peck of pickled parrot pizza?” I said.

That got me an angry one-eyed glare. He can’t wrap his beak around the tongue twister, and it annoys him no end. I feel guilty teasing him, but it does serve to get him off the subject.

“Where’s the boss?” I asked.

“Boss Man. Pizza.” Pig Pen has a vocabulary approaching a hundred fifty words, to which he adds about a word every other week. He’s efficient. “Pizza” does double-duty for lunch and dinner. “Pancakes”—“rancakes”—serves for breakfast.

“Anything going on?”

“Twenty minutes, Lincoln, forty minutes, Holland.”

“GWB?”

“Flat tire, upper deck.”

“Mass transit?”

He gave me his “who cares?” look and went back to chewing the cage.

Foos furnished Pig Pen’s office with two large Ficus trees, some potted plants, three perches, a swing, and an electric fountain that burbles water over a copper plate and some rocks. He has a view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. He also has a radio. It took him a day to learn how to work it and a week to determine his favorite station—1010 WINS. He pays special attention to “Traffic and Transit on the Ones,” although for reasons he’s yet to confide, he’s much more concerned with the state of bridges and tunnels than subways and buses. The day he learns to pronounce Kosciuszko, I’m putting him up for auction on eBay.

“Thanks for the update,” I said, heading for my office.
“Do svidaniya.”

“Ciao…”

Language skills are my contribution to his education.

“… cheapskate.”

“What?” I turned back.

“No pizza—cheapskate,” he said, the feathers on the back of his neck ruffling as his head nodded up and down. I swear he grins when he knows he’s come out with a zinger. I left him to his self-congratulation.

My office is in the northeast corner, with a view up the East River and out to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (Pig Pen knows that one). I can also see the roof of the building I live in two blocks away, where sometimes my well-endowed upstairs neighbor, Tina, sunbathes topless on her roof deck, oblivious to the walls of windows that surround her. Unfortunately, she’s happily married to a former backup linebacker for the New York Giants, so the best I can do is look on from afar, with the help of a pair of Steiner 20 × 80 military binoculars.

Tina wasn’t out, so I checked my e-mail. A message from Foos with the subject “SLUMMING?” It contained a link to a series of pages containing the information the Basilisk had generated on the Mulhollands. I went to the kitchen and made a grilled cheese sandwich from the cheddar and multigrain bread I found there. I grabbed a beer and returned to my office, ignoring the parrot’s imploring calls for sustenance. One of the things I miss about Russia is the beer, which may not be the best in the world, but it has a distinctive flavor I got used to. Most American beer is tasteless. I buy the occasional microbrew, but mostly I drink Czech pilsners—Pilsner Urquell or Budweiser Budvar, sold as Chechvar in the United States because of a trademark dispute with the Busch behemoth in St. Louis. They’re dry, they have a lot of flavor without being too hop-heavy, and they taste something like home.

I looked at the Basilisk’s work while I ate. Plenty of information on Mulholland himself, but mostly what you’d expect—houses (New York, Oyster Bay, Palm Beach), investments, although most of his wealth was in FTB stock, memberships, charitable boards, and so on. He and his wife had a housekeeper, Marisa Cabarillas, living with them. The butler must live elsewhere. He garaged a Maybach limousine and a Range Rover down the block, to the tune of more than two grand a month. He traveled to Europe three times in the last year on a Gulfstream V leased by FirstTrust, stopping in London, Frankfurt, and Zurich each trip. In January, he’d used his black American Express card to purchase two suits at Huntsman, six shirts at Turnbull & Asser, a bracelet for the missus at Asprey, and a Mantegna drawing at Conalghi. The Basilisk told me where he stayed and where he ate. I could’ve had a record of his phone calls, but it didn’t seem necessary. One interesting fact—in the last two months, he’d moved several million dollars into a brokerage account at Morgan Stanley. He’d been a big—make that very big—buyer of FTB stock. Those purchases were all badly under water now, and if he’d been buying on margin, he was almost certainly suffering a credit squeeze of his own.

Eva Mulholland lived at 211 East Seventieth Street, in an apartment that set someone back $5,250 a month—Dad, no doubt. Her occupation was student. She had $1,489 in her checking account. Her credit card charges indicated an affinity for the restaurants of Tribeca and the boutiques of SoHo and the Meatpacking District. She’d spent Christmas in the Caribbean and spring break in London and Moscow. Being a Mulholland wasn’t all bad.

Not all good, either. Eva had a record—a guilty plea to a marijuana possession charge two years earlier and another to shoplifting three months ago. Two suspended sentences—and two stints in rehab. Before the first bust, she had three thousand dollars deposited into her checking account every month. Electronic transfer from her father’s account. Since she got out of the detox center on Riverside Drive that had set her folks back sixty-five thousand dollars (for the first visit), her allowance had been cut by two-thirds. Dad’s idea of a tight leash.

The thing most of us don’t think about—or don’t want to think about—is how much information we generate on ourselves every day. Our appetites, our preferences, our habits and routines, our families, jobs, and finances. Most everything we do leaves a trail. Every phone call, e-mail, Web search, cash withdrawal, purchase, bill payment, trip, car rental, insurance claim, you name it. The trick is connecting up all those data points, among the billions and billions of others permanently stored in data-miners’ databases, to put together a profile of a person or tell you what someone is up to. That’s what the Basilisk does better than anything out there. I know. I use everything out there.

Having dispensed with the warm-up acts, I turned to the main event. The file on Felicity Mulholland was illuminating—up to a point. She’d married Rory in 2004. If I were being spiteful, I might have expected her to have led the Upper East Side trophy-wife life since then. I was wrong. No charges at Madison Avenue boutiques. No lunches at overpriced French restaurants where nobody pays attention to the food. A few evenings out—concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center—but not many. She paid regular, not overly frequent, attention to her hair, face, and nails. She’d taken a Christmas trip to London, flying coach, but stayed only one night at an innocuous hotel in Hammersmith, and flown home the next day. Paid cash for the airline ticket. No shopping, no theater, no restaurants. She made a similar trip in February. Polina and I had lived in London. My first foreign posting with the KGB. She’d never shown any interest in Hammersmith.

Before she married Mulholland, Felicity used the last name Kendall and lived in a rental on West Fifty-eighth Street for two years. Before that, she didn’t appear to live anywhere for three. Before
that,
she lived in a studio apartment in Queens, near LaGuardia Airport—a single woman, no Eva, no kids of any kind. All of which was accounted for by the fact that the real Felicity Kendall died when she was struck by a drunk driver on Queens Boulevard in 1997. Polina picked up her identity in 2000. The Basilisk came up empty on Polina Barsukova, which suggested she was already using another name when she arrived here. Hard to avoid concluding that Polina had something to hide. Question was, from whom? My leading candidate would be husband number two. Jealousy was part of his makeup, he believed firmly in getting even, and he had a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness that I knew to be one hundred percent well deserved.

I’d heard they’d split, but that was ten years ago. I’d also heard she’d been carrying on an affair with Kosokov. They both dropped from sight after 1999. Guess I’d assumed they’d gone off together, to the extent I’d thought about it. I’d been exiled, after all, partly by her, partly by the Cheka, partly self-imposed. I might not even be thinking about any of this today without Ivanov’s item on Kosokov this morning.
That
was another factor to be considered.

A loud
arrrr-oooo-gahhhh
reverberated through the space. Our doorbell—Foos’s contribution to office ambience. He likes to hit it on the way in. Pig Pen called out “Pizza!” in response. A few moments later, the hulk of a six-foot-five mountain man dressed in black filled my door, holding a half-chewed slice.

“Man, you are definitely hangin’ in the wrong ’hood,” the boom-box voice boomed.

The first time you meet him—maybe a few times after that—Foos is an intimidating sight. For openers, he’s two hundred sixty pounds big. The weight is evenly distributed. He’s not fat, but no one would call him muscled either. His preferred form of exercise is walking to his next meal. He’s in his midforties, with a sharp face and black eyes—but unlike Mulholland’s, his sparkle with curiosity and humor. A large, pointed nose runs left to right as you look at him. His mouth opens mostly on the right side, adding to his lopsided appearance. He wears heavy black rectangular glasses with chunky lenses and carries a thick mane of black curly hair that cascades around his shoulders, arms, and chest. If he ever cut it, the barber would need a pickup to haul away the clippings. Everything about him shouts eccentric, if not downright strange, and in his case, you can judge a book by its cover. Some people march to their own drummer—Foos has his own rock group. The thing I can never figure is, whenever he shows up with a new girlfriend—roughly every other month—she looks like she stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. He, of course, treats this like it’s perfectly natural. As Artie Shaw once observed, women aren’t attracted to Mick Jagger by his looks. Artie should know—he married Ava Gardner
and
Lana Turner.

“Didn’t see many of your friends up there, that’s true,” I said. “Bernie asked me to help. Mulholland’s his biggest client.”

“Ah, the Cardinal Consigliere. That explains it. He knows all the best people.”

“He helps pay the rent.”

“True enough, much as I don’t like to admit it. But you and Bernie have all you’re getting from me. If there’s any justice, that scumbag will do at least five years.”