No Time for Heroes (19 page)

Redin went quiet at the clear implication. You've told Moscow?'

‘You've seen every message I've sent to Moscow.'

‘Are you
going
to tell them?'

‘I don't see any practical purpose.'

The vaguest suggestion of a smile hovered at the corners of Redin's mouth. Abruptly the man turned and left the office, without saying anything more.

Less than a mile away, on the fifth floor of the FBI building, Leonard Ross stared down at the Russian names and said: ‘Looks like we've got that great big can of worms nobody wanted. The Secretary of State is going to be one very unhappy man.'

‘Danilov says he's not getting any vibes that it's official.'

‘I hardly expected he would: or that he would tell us, if he did.'

‘He'd tell me,' insisted Cowley. He hadn't expected Rafferty and Johannsen's inquiry to turn out as it had. He decided against discussing it with the Director: they were talking about positives, not negatives. Not that it was strictly negative. More inexplicable at the moment.

‘Right now I believe we've got unarguable evidence of the Russian Mafia operating out of the Russian embassy,' said Ross. ‘And I don't like that one little bit.'

‘How public are we going to go?'

‘I shouldn't think Hartz would want to go public at all. There's no advantage to us in doing so, is there?'

‘None.'

‘Best left to the diplomats,' judged the Director. ‘Any playback from New York?'

Cowley shook his head. ‘It would be a miracle if there was.'

‘A miracle is exactly what I'd welcome at the moment. Call me the moment there's anything.'

‘I'd like to think it would be that quick,' said Cowley. He paused. ‘But I don't.'

He looped up to the embassy to collect Danilov, who was waiting. On their way back to the 14th Street bridge, Cowley announced that the organisers and staff of every event Serov had marked as having been to on the occasions Michel Paulac had been in Washington were adamant the Russian had not attended. There had been sign-yourself guests list for four of them; Petr Serov's name did not appear on any.

‘Is it essential to sign such registers?' asked Danilov, unfamiliar with the practice.

‘No,' admitted Cowley. ‘But there are always photographers. Our photographic experts have examined the contact sheets of everything that was taken, at every function. And not just for the obvious people in the foreground: every background, too. Serov doesn't show.'

‘What about Paulac?'

Cowley shook his head. ‘That's the intriguing thing. Two separate sets of people at two separate affairs recognise his photograph, although we've got to allow for the fact the man's picture has been splashed across every newspaper and television screen in Washington for the past week. But one of our photographic guys thinks he can see him in the background of one of the contact prints, although it wouldn't be strong enough to go to court with.'

‘It doesn't make sense!' protested Danilov. ‘Why should Paulac be at these things if Serov
wasn't
!'

‘Don't ask me,' said Cowley, ‘I just work here.'

As they approached National Airport, Cowley pointed out the lot where the financier's body had been found. Danilov allowed himself to be swept along by the walk-on, walk-off, write-your-own-ticket convenience of the shuttle, thinking of the shoulder barging, cancellation-without-notice chaos of Russian air travel. Aboard the aircraft he read several times the instructions for the apparatus on the seat back facing him to make sure he had not misunderstood before saying to Cowley: ‘This is a telephone to make calls while we're in mid-air?'

Cowley missed the Russian's astonishment. ‘You'll probably need an American-billed credit card …' He began to grope into his inside pocket. ‘You can use mine if you want to make a call.'

‘No,' refused Danilov, glad the other man hadn't detected his naivety. ‘It can wait.'

From his window seat, he gazed down through the puddled clouds, wondering what were the names of the occasional neatly arranged townships and even more occasional smoke-belching industrial sprawl. A lot of the houses had the azure-blue postage stamp of a swimming pool in their gardens, and every built-up area displayed its white-painted church with a needle-point spire thrusting upwards to where God was supposed to be. Danilov supposed there were dachas with swimming pools in Russia – probably in the hills above Moscow, where the former Communist élite had played at being Tsars – but he'd never seen them from the air on the rare times he'd flown out of the city. And few Russian churches were white, and all had squat, fat-breasted towers not really indicating any upward direction at all. Perhaps in Russia even the clerics weren't sure where God was supposed to live. Or maybe the churches of Mother Russia were supposed to have breasts.

The announcement that they were approaching New York came over the public address system before Danilov could see it, because he was sitting on the wrong side of the aircraft on its approach. Then the plane banked and the city that most people – certainly most Russians – thought to
be
America all by itself lay set out below, a packed-together jumble of snag-toothed skyscrapers and tower buildings, everything overlaid by a thumb-print smudge of purple-brown smog. As the plane descended it was just possible to see the tight, joined-up lines of toy cars and lorries, so there had to be roads, but Danilov's impression of Manhattan was of a solid mass, a sharply carved or weathered cliff in the caves and gullies of which people presumably lived.

The FBI's New York supervisor, Hank Slowen, was a neat, compact, slightly built man. He wore rimless spectacles, his fair hair combed precisely from an arrow-straight parting. Cowley had only ever known the man wear blue, as he was today, the jacket unrumpled, the trouser creases sabre-sharp. Slowen's neatness was accentuated by the appearance of the man beside him: the Brooklyn detective, a lieutenant introduced as Wes Bradley, was a burly, bulging man whom nothing seemed to fit. The waistband of his trousers was lost beneath the roll of his stomach and the check sports jacket perched on his shoulders, with no chance of being fastened across the ample midriff even if there had been a button on the front, which there wasn't. The shirt was fresh but already surrendering, the open collar tips turned up by the knot of a tugged-down tie.

Bradley directed them towards a dented, paint-dull Ford, badly parked in a prohibited area, the attachable but unlit police emergency light prominent on the dashboard. Danilov knew men like Bradley all over Moscow, detectives who used police authority as a passport to where no-one else could go. The interior of the vehicle was as neglected as its owner, overflowing ashtrays spilled on the floor, among the take-away food wrappers; the upholstery on the driver's seat had parted in protest along two seams. The engine was slowly choking to death.

Over his shoulder, Bradley said: ‘So what can I tell you?'

Answering the question in kind, Cowley said: ‘Who killed a Russian diplomat and a Swiss financier. That'll do fine for starters.'

Bradley regarded him sourly in the rear-view mirror. ‘We got two addresses, both at the Beach. After he got out of the slammer Chestnoy lived for a few weeks over a shop actually on Brighton Beach Avenue. Last known address was just off Riegelmann boardwalk. We gotta sheet on another of your names, Igor Rimyans. No prosecutions or convinctions. Lotta chatter about connections with the Colombians. That's the growth industry, drugs. They do a cocaine speciality here, like crack. Called “ice”.'

Danilov was in the back of the car, by the window, listening but looking out as they zig-zagged through the streets, presumably towards the unseen and unsuspected sea. He was surprised, shocked almost, by what he was seeing. So far, his experience of America had been restricted to the triumphant boulevards of Washington and its smaller but well-maintained, well-kept streets in the downtown area and around Georgetown. The only suggestion of social deprivation had been from the protesters huddled under their tarpaulins around the White House and he'd thought that theatrical, as protests always were to some degree.

What he was seeing now wasn't staged. There were exceptions, sometimes whole streets of well preserved clapboards with tended garden patches. But far more were sagged and collapsing, broken windows cardboarded over, wooden slats curling away from their framework. The roads were clotted with cars, all decaying like the houses: a lot had been vandalised, lopsided on bricks or metal crates where wheels had been stolen, doors gaping to show dashboards and seats ripped out, hood and trunk lids stretched open, like the beaks of hungry fledglings. There were hoardings and brick walls of offices or small shopping complexes, too, and all were wreathed and filigreed with graffiti – sometimes aimless whorls, sometimes the philosophy of the mindless in whose vocabulary fuck was the only verb.

Bradley said: ‘We got people out on the streets. But don't get too hopeful.'

‘I'm not,' said Cowley.

Slowen was travelling in the front. He twisted back and said: ‘It's a ghetto. Closes up like a clam shell when the water ripples …' He was so soft-spoken it was difficult to hear above the noise of the distressed engine.

‘How well organised?' asked Danilov.

‘Well enough,' said Bradley. ‘Started off pretty ragged. Guys selling forged driving licences and credit cards; stolen gas from hijacked tankers. They're still running that, but they've moved on to extortion and running hookers. And like I said, drugs, everyone's entry to the good life.'

‘What about positive connections with Russia?' asked Danilov.

He saw Bradley's shoulders go up and down in a shrug. ‘Organised connections, we don't know. Never come across a trail so far. But everyone at Brighton Beach's got family in the old country.' He stretched backwards, offering a folder. ‘Guess you probably got them already, but there's our sheets on Chebrakin, Chestnoy and Rimyans. Mug shots, too. All we've got on your fourth guy, Valentin Yashev, is a suspect file, and we're not sure if the photograph really is him: it came from an informer who probably wanted the twenty bucks to score a coke bag. Yashev's supposed to be an enforcer, heavily into extortion: muscle right up through to the top of his head.'

‘A man who would kill if he were told,' said Slowen, thoughtlessly.

‘Shit, man!' exclaimed Bradley. ‘All these guys will kill, sometimes just if they feel like it. You know what Chebrakin said when he was questioned … questioned by some dumb fuck who hadn't read him his Miranda Rights, so we couldn't produce it at the trial …? He said he shot this liquor store owner because the man had waved him away dismissively. Not shown the proper respect. From that, some motherfucker defence lawyer made a case for self defence manslaughter, can you believe! What it was was Chebrakin sticking a thirty-eight in the poor bastard's face and pulling the trigger because he hadn't paid his dues.'

‘Was that how he
was
killed, shot in the face?' seized Danilov at once.

‘Sorry,' apologised Bradley. ‘Just a way of talking: it was actually a body wound.'

‘Is there any ritual, about the way they do kill?' asked Cowley.

Bradley's eyes came up in the rear-view mirror again. ‘We've asked around about mouth shots. No one's come across that before, not among the Russians. Looks like a first.'

‘I ran the same check with the same result,' said Slowen. ‘None of our people had come across it outside the Sicilian or American Mafias.'

Bradley came into Brighton Beach from the north, driving parallel with the ocean. Danilov saw that boardwalk meant exactly what it was, a very practical planked thoroughfare stretching out over the seafront from which sand could easily be swept between the palings. A lot of advertisements and cafe and shop names fronting the water had the word ‘Moscow' in them.

‘Welcome to Little Odessa!' said Bradley.

‘Odessa's in the Ukraine,' said Cowley.

‘Give the man a present from the back shelf!' said Bradley. ‘That's where most of these immigrants come from: more Ukrainians than any other ethnic group.'

Bradley hefted the police emergency globe back on to the dashboard, and halted the car beneath a sign prohibiting parking on Brighton Beach Avenue. He got awkwardly from the vehicle, slowed by his bulk, and said: ‘Let's go hear the word.'

There was an alley from the avenue, leading to the boardwalk. A black in jeans and basketball shoes was leaning against a wall at the far end. When they got closer, Danilov saw the T-shirt slogan read ‘Jesus for President'. Bradley hesitated, leaving the contact to the other man, who shrugged and came up to them immediately.

‘There ain't no secrets here,' he said. ‘I might as well be in uniform in a black-and-white with the siren going.'

Bradley introduced him all around, just as Wilkes, before saying: ‘Well?'

‘You're not going to believe this,' said Wilkes. ‘No-one knows nothing about nothing. The last address we had for Chebrakin is a no-call. It's over a laundry: was two rooms that were let up until a year ago. Now it's the laundry store-room. Full of washing powders and ironing flats and shit like that.'

‘Shown the pictures around?' pressed the lieutenant.

The black detective nodded. ‘Covered all the bars for three streets back from here: few on the side as well. Brought in the entire night shift last night and four guys today. Zilch …' He smiled towards Cowley and Danilov. ‘You guys shouldn't have bothered to leave home.'

Cowley said to Bradley: ‘What about regular informers?'

It was Wilkes who responded, nodding seriously. ‘Your guys are here somewhere. One or two of them, at least. I know that because of what we're
not
getting. The word's out, OK? By now there should have been something coming back, even if it was bullshit: guys trying to rip us off for a few bucks. It happens every time we raise a red flag, promising reward for results. This time we got nothing. Which tells me our snitches know they're going to get their peckers nailed to that boardwalk over there if they even so much as acknowledge the existence of the people you want.'