The Icon Thief (10 page)

He was about to unlock his driver’s side door when he heard the low sound of footsteps behind him. Before he could react, someone pressed a hard metal object against his spine. “Don’t move.”

Powell froze. Then he recognized the voice. “Hello, Wolfe. How did you find me?”

He turned around. Rachel Wolfe was standing there, a pocket flashlight in one hand. She looked pissed. “Your transponder. Most of the new vehicles have one. Mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

Unlocking the car, Powell motioned her into the passenger seat. There was a folded newspaper lying on the dashboard, which he handed to her as they sat down. “Take a look at this.”

Wolfe studied the paper. It was a local Armenian weekly, opened to a headshot of a boy in his teens. A gold chain encircled his neck. On his upper lip was a cleft palate scar. “So what?”

“I keep an eye on the Russian and Armenian papers,” Powell said. “Usually, all I read are the obituaries. If there’s a picture of a young guy wearing a flashy chain,
odds are it was a hit. This one is slightly different. Missing persons case. His grandmother says he’s been gone for days. I don’t know what happened, but Sharkovsky had something to do with it.”

He told her what he had found. When he was done, Wolfe only shook her head. “Why didn’t you come to us?”

“I didn’t think you’d take it seriously,” Powell said. “And don’t tell me I was wrong.”

Wolfe sighed. “You know, this is exactly the sort of thing that got you in trouble back home. Breaking and entering aside, you aren’t supposed to be conducting investigations on your own. The terms of the exchange program are clear. You’re here to advise, to consult on cases involving global organized crime—”

Powell broke in. “I’m here to get you a warrant. That’s the only reason the Bureau agreed to embed me at all. They knew it would be easier to get a wire through FISA, so they flew me in to make the case for the foreign connection. Now that they’ve got their wiretap sorted, they’re throwing me away.”

He knew it would be hard for her to refute what he was saying. The day before, a federal court had approved their warrant application. Phones in the names of Sharkovsky and four others would be placed under electronic surveillance, along with landlines and pay phones at the club. Because privacy guidelines discouraged the sharing of wiretaps with foreign agencies, however, it had been decided that Powell would have no access to the wire that his own testimony had secured.

At last, Wolfe spoke again. “They aren’t throwing you away. They want you to work with the police on the dead
girl. That’s why I came looking for you. The autopsy results are in.”

Although the dead girl was far from the first thing on his mind, he still felt a trace of reflexive curiosity. “What do they say?”

Wolfe reached into her purse, taking out a notebook, and opened it to the most recent page. “It looks like she was strangled. There’s bruising and discoloration below the left breast, and two of her ribs are cracked. As I see it, she was lying on the floor, faceup. The killer wrapped his hands around her neck, nearly straddling her, and pressed a knee against her chest to pin her down—”

“Yes, that’s one possibility,” Powell said. “What about the date of death?”

“Based on the condition of the body, she had to have been dumped during a hot, dry season. And they found fragments of green almonds in her stomach. You don’t see them in most stores, but they’re available at Russian markets for three weeks each year, usually from late April to early May.”

She turned to another page. “The scan also revealed that she had breast implants. The police were hoping that the serial numbers would let them trace her through patient records, but when they excavated the chest, they found nothing but a yellow compound the consistency of bread dough. It’s an injectable alloplastic, formerly used in breast implants of a particularly unsafe kind. Illegal in this part of the world, but available, until recently, in Russia and Eastern Europe.”

Powell weighed this information. “So let’s say she was a dancer and prostitute at the Club Marat. She was killed
by one of her clients, maybe in the rooms above the club, and Sharkovsky’s men hid her body under the boards.”

“That’s my guess as well,” Wolfe said. “But we need to tread carefully. If the police start sniffing around the club, Sharkovsky will alter his pattern, so we need to make sure that they don’t jump the gun. Barlow says he’ll feel better with a liaison in place. That means you and me.”

“A liaison.” He looked out the windshield at the hot, drowsy street. Louis Barlow, the assistant special agent in charge of the criminal division, was a veteran agent with a reputation as a shrewd investigator, but he had shown limited enthusiasm for the foreign angle now that its purpose had been served. Powell, who knew exactly how it felt to see an investigation stall and die, sensed that he was being sidelined, but was also aware that there was nothing to be done.

In any case, the dead girl gave him an opening. It wasn’t much, but it would do. “All right,” Powell said. “If Barlow wants me to stick with the dead girl, I will. And I’ll keep the police in line.”

Wolfe opened her door. “Fine. And I’ll see what I can find on the Armenian kid. But we’re doing it my way, not yours.”

She got out of the car. Just before heading over to where her own sedan was parked, she bent down to look at Powell. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of something steely behind her habitual reserve.

“It isn’t the police I’m worried about,” Wolfe said. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

Turning away, she closed the door in Powell’s face. A second later, she was gone.

“S
o I have considered the plan, and have decided to make one change,” Sharkovsky said. “Misha, as you know, has a bad leg. Better to go with a younger man. Zhenya, not Misha, will accompany you to the party.”

Ilya, the sweat falling in pearls from his face, was surprised by this. They had been seated in the
banya
, eyes closed, for nearly an hour. Beside them, Zhenya, who had just poured more water onto the stones, returned to the bench. Taking a damp bundle of birch branches, he lashed himself with the switch, which made a soft whack each time it struck his shoulders, the leaves flying to either side.

Looking down at the wooden floor, Ilya exhaled. Changing the plan now was asking for trouble, but he knew that he had no choice. It was not the first time he had remained silent. Killing the Armenians had been a mistake. With four men dead so close to home, it would not be long before the police came calling. But this was not something that he could ever say aloud.

He brushed the fragments of leaves from his skin. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Good,” Sharkovsky said. A moment later, as if he had only been waiting for the outcome of this exchange,
Zhenya tossed his switch aside and slid off the bench, leaving his towel behind. The door opened and closed with a flash of white. Through the rectangle of glass that looked onto the main bathhouse, Ilya saw the young enforcer plunge into the pool without bothering to shower off first.

He turned back to the old man. Naked except for a towel and hat of felt, his shoulders standing out like pinions, Sharkovsky was a poor forked thing, a pair of stars etched below his collarbone, a rose over his heart. Now he spoke without opening his eyes: “There is something I have wanted to ask you for some time. You were in prison. You have been with Vasylenko for years. So where are your tattoos?”

Ilya looked away. “I had tattoos once. Vasylenko arranged to have them removed.”

“I see.” Sharkovsky coughed. “I was wondering if it was because you were a Jew. I have known such men, brave ones, who refused to get tattoos because they said that the body was a gift from God—”

“Some don’t get tattoos,” Ilya said. “Others don’t pierce their ears. Like my mother.”

Sharkovsky’s eyes opened. “I didn’t know that Scythians had mothers. I thought they were raised on mare’s milk. She is alive?”

Ilya shook his head, dislodging a cascade of drops. “Both are dead. Many years now.”

The old man gave him a look of what might have been sympathy. “Your parents died when you were in Vladimir?”

Ilya saw that he was being tested, although the terms of the examination remained obscure. There was a cult of motherhood within the
bratva
, and many of its men bore tattoos testifying to a mother’s love, in both the
subjective and objective genitive, but it was an abstract devotion to the mother of thieves. Ilya had never known a thief who would give his own mother so much as a kopek.

He decided to avoid the question. “When I met Vasylenko, he became my family.”

Sharkovsky only grunted. Ilya looked at the floor again, fighting a wave of unwanted memories. Even if his words had been on the rhetorical side, they were close to the truth. During his first year in prison, Vasylenko had been nothing but a scarecrow at the edge of the exercise yard, wearing loose coveralls and a cross of pounded aluminum. Then, one morning, the
vor
had cornered him at the fence. Before Ilya could speak, Vasylenko had turned over his crucifix, revealing what was on the other side. Scratched into the metal had been a star made of two linked triangles.

“For my mother,” Vasylenko had said, turning it over again. “You understand?”

Ilya, astonished, had been about to reply, but the old man had silenced him. Later that night, a guard had brought him to Vasylenko’s cell, where the
vor
, hands tucked into his robe, had spoken softly:

“I know about your parents. The snowfall, I hear, was heavy that day. When they lit the fire, they had no way of knowing that the flue was blocked. If it is any consolation, they would have died in their sleep, which is more than most of us are granted.” The old man had paused. “I imagine that you blame yourself.”

Ilya had said nothing. He had not spoken of the circumstances of his parents’ death to anyone in the prison, and was not pleased to learn that Vasylenko had been looking into his past.

“But it wasn’t your fault that you weren’t there,”
Vasylenko had continued. “I know how it begins. You make a few deals on the black market to feed your family. Then, one day, some shit of a cop is killed when a deal goes wrong. The Chekists arrest you, decide that you are the perfect one to take the fall, and with that, your life is over. So much wasted potential—”

Ilya, thinking of the star scratched into the cross, had found his voice at last. “How do you know this?”

Vasylenko had smiled. “Do you know the story of the tzaddikim? They are the thirty-six righteous men for whose sake God permits the world to endure. They live in poverty, unknown, unhonored—”

“Yes, I know,” Ilya had said sharply. “Some even sin, to avoid the charge of vanity.”

“Or, perhaps, to secure a greater good. You see, there are many kinds of oppression. The oligarchs are as bad as the Chekists. They would replace wolves with foxes. They fail to see that the idea of order itself is to blame, which is why the righteous men have always labored in secret.”

“But none of the tzaddikim knows who he is. And you still say you’re one of them?”

“No. But they do exist, under other names. Men like us have been victims for far too long. I am offering you a chance to restore the balance.” Vasylenko had studied his face. “I see promise in you. You have the eyes of a Scythian. A wanderer of the steppes. But even he needs a home—”

Ilya’s head jerked upward. For a second, he had felt himself in Vladimir again, and was surprised to find himself in the
banya
, years removed from prison, with another old man watching him from across the bench.

Sharkovsky was regarding him with evident curiosity. “Come. Let’s talk outside.”

They rose, the sweat pouring down their bodies. Outside, the bathhouse was clean and bright. Framed hockey jerseys hung on the walls, along with admonitions not to run by the pool. A handful of bathers lounged in plastic chairs, paging through newspapers or watching the plasma screens mounted to the ceiling. Zhenya had left a few leaves on the water, but was nowhere to be seen.

A whisper of cool air caused Ilya’s flesh to prickle. At his side, Sharkovsky stretched, his ligaments creaking. “You seem displeased that Zhenya will be playing a larger role. Does it bother you?”

Ilya’s eyes fell on the leaves drifting on the mirror of the pool. “He’s inexperienced.”

“Yes. And he’s no genius. But every wise man was once a young fool. And I have an old friend who says that even you, once upon a time, were not so different.” Sharkovsky finished his stretch, then padded over to the cold plunge. “But you still haven’t told me why you removed your tattoos.”

Thinking of Vasylenko, Ilya reminded himself that these two men, for all their visible differences, were not so dissimilar after all. “For my work. The man who stands out gets killed.”

“Which is something that not everyone understands.” Sharkovsky’s eyes flicked toward the nearest television. “You see?”

Ilya followed his gaze. On a news broadcast, a man was being interviewed about the rumors of war in South Ossetia. Although the volume was turned down, Ilya recognized the speaker at once, and experienced a moment of almost tender recognition, as if it were a dear friend. He felt the past fall blessedly away, replaced by the necessity of what was to come. It was Anzor Archvadze.

“N
ever trust anything you read online,” Tanya said, pushing up her shutter shades. “I’m not just talking about the web, either. A scanned book is easy to search, but you lose crucial information. When you see a book in a library, you can tell if it’s been read to pieces or never been touched. You can see which pages have been thumbed the most. And you can see other things, too. Here, smell this.”

Taking a folder from her purse, Tanya withdrew a yellowed sheet of paper, which she thrust into Maddy’s hands. They were seated together at a café table in Bryant Park. The lawn itself was closed for reseeding, so they had claimed a spot at the edge of the grass, among the flocks of office workers.

Maddy glanced doubtfully at the page, which was covered in faded copperplate. At her friend’s urging, she raised it to her nose. Beneath the odor of old dust, she caught a whiff of something acidic. “Vinegar?”