No Time for Heroes (20 page)

Cowley sighed. ‘Somehow I wish you hadn't told me that.'

‘What do you want to do?' asked Bradley.

Cowley wished he knew: he'd hoped the local PD would have had leads, things to follow up, by the time they arrived. He looked at Danilov.

‘Let's start with the laundry,' suggested the Russian.

Just he and Cowley went, the others going with Wilkes to meet Brooklyn detectives still on the streets.

Both men in the laundry were wearing Jewish yarmulkes; one was much older than the other, and Danilov guessed they were father and son. When they produced the photograph of Chestnoy the younger man said someone had already asked and they didn't know where the man was: they hadn't seen him for more than a year. The older man continued working at the steam-press, wisped in white mist. He started, visibly, when Danilov repeated the enquiry directly at him in Russian – the younger one looked surprised, too – but repeated his son's denial, in that language. When Cowley, also in Russian, asked about redirected mail, the younger man said Chestnoy's mail had stopped, months before. When there had been some, the man had called to collect it, not given a forwarding address. They didn't know any magazine or periodical to which he had subscribed when he had lived there; they didn't know any of his friends or any of his favourite places in Brighton Beach, either. They also didn't know if he'd had a girlfriend or a wife. He'd never paid his rent by cheque, always cash, so they didn't know which bank he used, if any. There hadn't been a telephone connected upstairs and he'd never asked to use theirs, so they hadn't overheard any conversations.

Danilov and Cowley accepted the offer to look at where Chestnoy had once lived. Danilov went determinedly through both rooms, looking for anything that might have been left behind, even scanning the walls and scattered newspapers on the floor, upon which the man might have written a reminder note or a telephone number. He got dirty and dusty doing it, and found nothing.

They worked their way shop by shop, bar by bar, cafe by cafe along the boardwalk and then moved back into adjoining and parallel streets, constantly speaking Russian, which did not always work: sometimes people replied in Ukrainian, which neither Cowley nor Danilov spoke. It was well past lunchtime when they stopped at the Moscow restaurant, fronting the sea, and had borscht and boiled sturgeon. Danilov insisted on paying. They delayed their questioning here until they'd finished eating. No-one admitted ever having met or known Yuri Chestnoy or anyone else on their list.

The FBI local supervisor and the Brooklyn detectives were waiting at the pre-arranged rendezvous, the alley where they'd met Wilkes, when Cowley and Danilov returned in mid-afternoon.

‘None of my guys came up with anything,' reported Wilkes.

‘I'll buy the beer,' announced Cowley, nodding back along the avenue towards a bar adorned with less graffiti than any of the surrounding buildings. No-one protested they couldn't drink on duty. Everyone did order beer except Bradley, who asked for Black Label scotch, and Cowley, who hesitated and had soda with a lime wedge.

‘You know the heat there is on this,' Cowley reminded, gazing around the table. ‘We're at government-to-government level, questions being asked for which a lot of important people want answers that make sense. So far …' he nodded sideways, towards Danilov, ‘… we have not been doing very well providing them. I don't want to go back to Washington to tell the Director in person that people we want very much to talk to – people whose names were listed by a murdered Russian diplomat – are somewhere here in Brighton Beach but we can't find them. I want the entire population of this little town to think the pogroms of Stalin and the Nazi invasion have started all over again, in tandem. I'll get as many extra men as are necessary drafted in and I'll have the Director personally tell your department the Bureau will pick up the tab for all the overtime. I don't want a dealer selling a dime bag to any screaming addict. I don't want a bet placed on a number or a horse or anything else. I don't want a hooker turning a single trick. If a seagull shits on the boardwalk, I want it arrested and charged. I want Brighton Beach to be squeezed dry and I want it known why it's being squeezed dry …' He looked at Wilkes. ‘Tell your snitches and tell them to tell everyone else: Brighton Beach is out of business and out of bounds until we get a steer towards Chebrakin or Chestnoy or Rimyans or Yashev. Everyone sweats until I get cool. OK?'

‘Sounds like fun,' said Bradley.

The contract had been given to Mikhail Antipov, who had carried out the Washington hits, because Yerin had said it was important the murder was identical, although it had to be a different Makarov. They met to hear how it had gone in the totally secure club on Pecatnikov Street. They'd allowed Antipov the brief bravado and congratulated him on his choice of an opposing hitman in the Ostankino and paid the bonus. The others on the Chechen
komitet
were surprised when Yerin, the long term thinker, insisted Antipov leave the gun with them.

‘This shouldn't just be a killing,' decided Yerin, after Antipov had been dismissed.

‘What?' asked Gusovsky expectantly.

‘Kosov might not succeed in getting Danilov. So we should take out insurance.'

‘What sort of insurance?' questioned Gusovsky.

‘Something that will permanently get rid of Danilov if he won't play,' declared Yerin.

‘Kill him as well?' anticipated Zimin.

‘Of course not!' said Yerin impatiently. ‘Something far better than that.'

When Yerin finished explaining Zimin said: ‘It's a brilliant concept. But I can't believe it will work: it's too complicated.'

‘Leave the clever thinking to me,' smiled the sightless man, superciliously. ‘You just worry about managing your killers.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The time difference between Washington and Moscow worked better in reverse, because it enabled Pavin to send to America as much as was known about the murdered Ivan Ignatov before Danilov left the embassy the following morning. Quite obviously, in such a short period, the extent of that information was still limited to official, available records, but what there was offered another ill-fitting piece for the incomplete jigsaw. Ivan Ignatsevich Ignatov had a criminal history ranging from pimping, violence – one victim lost an eye, another was permanently crippled from a shattered kneecap – to foreign tourist mugging and larceny from Customs-bonded warehouses at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport. By far the most interesting and connecting fact, however, was that the man's crime sheet identified him as a member of the Ostankino Family, one of the Militia-acknowledged clans making up the Moscow Mafia.

His body had been found near the permanent exhibition area for international trade, by the river loop. It was possible the killer or killers had hoped it would be washed down-stream, but instead it had lodged on a just-submerged mud bank. Like the Washington victims, he had been shot three times: the complete autopsy was yet to be carried out, but the scene-of-crime preliminary examination suggested the mouth shot had been the last: an earlier bullet, directly into the heart, had been the cause of death. The bullet to the mouth and what was believed to be its casing had been recovered. It had come from a 9mm Makarov pistol. There was no evidence of robbery or torture.

Cowley read the single-page report quickly. ‘Back in your territory?'

‘It always had to be there, at some time and in some way,' said Danilov.

‘How public are these Families?'

Danilov considered his answer. ‘We don't have the resources – or the official urging – properly to move against them. And a lot of people don't want them curbed anyway. The Mafia provide what can't be obtained.

‘Chicago, 1920s,' compared Cowley.

‘The role model,' agreed Danilov.

‘But they
are
known people?'

‘It's not been my section,' apologised Danilov. Organised gang investigation had supposedly been the responsibility of Anatoli Metkin, before his elevation to Director. Could that be the reason for the man's near-hysterical interest in the Serov killing, even though it had been 5,000 miles from Moscow?

‘So we could shake the trees and maybe make a few apples fall?'

Danilov frowned, unaccustomed to Cowley speaking like so many of the other detectives but glad he understood: quite often over the last few days he had had to struggle to keep up. ‘We could try.'

‘Let's hope with more success than Brighton Beach.'

‘Let's hope,' agreed Danilov, sincerely. It might prove even more obstructed, this time, with officialdom added to the difficulties.

‘So we're going back,' said Cowley.

He didn't want to, Danilov acknowledged: so much so that since Pavin's call the previous night and the cables that morning he had consciously avoided thinking about it, which was ridiculous. And then he fully realised what Cowley had said –
we're
going back. In Moscow, even with the uncertain support of the deputies in the Foreign and Interior Ministries, there would still be the intrusion and obstruction of the resentful Metkin, whom he did know, and others, whom he didn't. But not if Cowley were there as well. ‘Back we go again,' he agreed.

‘I suppose we do,' agreed Cowley.

That was certainly what Leonard Ross expected, when Cowley met the Director an hour later. The man agreed at once to a Task Force to blitz Brighton Beach and that Hank Slowen could supervise from the New York office. The Director also promised personally to brief the Moscow embassy, through which Cowley had to communicate daily. Remembering the gulag-type living conditions of the American residential compound, Cowley hurriedly said he'd prefer to live this time in an hotel, which Ross accepted without question.

Back in his own office Cowley ensured he and Danilov were booked on the same flight and cabled the FBI station at the embassy, asking for a reservation to be made at the Savoy.

At the Russian embassy on the other side of the White House and Lafayette Square Danilov sat at Serov's desk, listening to his own telephone at Kirovskaya ring unanswered. He put it down, deciding he would have to return unannounced. He had a hell of a lot to do before leaving Washington the following day. And he still hadn't had his hair cut, which they did so much better here than they did in Moscow.

It was at the request of the Secretary of State that Leonard Ross invited the Washington mayor, the police chief and the chief of detectives to the Bureau later that afternoon for as full a briefing as possible.

When Ross finished, Mort Halpern said: ‘You think we got a whole new Mafia organisation, stretching from here to Russia? Or a tie-up between our Cosa Nostra and theirs, somehow connected through the embassy?'

‘We don't know, not yet,' admitted the FBI Director. ‘But it looks like it. And if we have, it's the most serious development of organised crime I can think of.'

‘Either scenario worries the hell out of me,' said Halpern.

‘Of us all,' agreed Ross.

‘We going public on this?' asked Elliott Jones.

‘No!' said Ross adamantly. ‘Under no circumstances! This stays wrapped for as long as we can keep it that way.'

‘What about warning the public?'

‘Warning them of what?' rejected Ross. ‘The only thing that would come of releasing it at this time would be panic and more headlines that we could handle.'

The whole intention of the briefing was, ironically, to prevent any leak percolating out to the media: by sticking to their understanding to keep the City officials informed, Ross and the Secretary of State expected them to maintain theirs and make no statement, public or otherwise, about the case.

It showed surprising, even naive, trust.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The arrival at Sheremet'yevo was disorganised, the airport clogged by its customary chaos, and Danilov was embarrassed at the comparison with his smooth, considerate reception in Washington. He had advised both ministries as well as Petrovka of their flight details, but there were no arrangements to ease them through the official formalities. A surly uniformed immigration officer took an inordinate time studying Cowley's American passport, visa and entry form: finally Danilov tried to pull rank, identified himself and told the man to hurry, which was a mistake because the officer truculently did the opposite, which Danilov should have anticipated. It took almost a further forty-five minutes for their luggage to appear on the carousel, and when it did Cowley's case had a deep score down its side.

There were two groups waiting for them outside on the concourse. Anatoli Metkin, in his full general's uniform, was with Pavin, who looked visibly uncomfortable: one of the three men in the American embassy group held a photograph from which to identify Cowley. There was a confusion of introductions, and a momentary impasse over which car Cowley would occupy driving into Moscow. The American solved it by announcing he wanted to be briefed as soon as possible: he would travel in the embassy vehicle but in convoy to Petrovka, for an immediate arrival conference.

‘What is there from America to bring me up to date?' demanded Metkin the moment Danilov entered their limousine. It was Metkin's official Volga, with his personal driver. Pavin rode next to the man in the front seat, Metkin in the rear, alongside Danilov.

‘There's nothing you haven't already been told.'

‘What co-operation was there?'

Danilov was determined to retain the independence granted him by the Deputy Interior Minister. Which made it inevitable he would antagonise Metkin. ‘You'll obviously get a copy of my report to the ministries, like you've seen everything else.'

Metkin's lined face tightened into a mask. ‘I asked you a question!' He spoke with exaggerated quietness, trying to intimidate.