Crime Machine

10

IT WAS DARK WHEN CARDINAL and Delorme came out of the fur warehouse. The temperature had dropped, and blades of cold pressed against Cardinal’s face. The parking lot was empty except for three or four cars and a red pickup with a bumper sticker that said I ♥ Country Music.

“Lev Bastov’s been in this industry forever,” Cardinal said. “It may be his killer has too. At some point we’re going to have to talk to some real old-timers. Get background on him and the local biz.”

“What did you think of our Russian agent?” Delorme said. She pulled her hood up against the cold.

“I think she liked you.”

“Are you kidding? She was completely hostile.”

“Funny thing, Lise—you don’t seem to have any trouble understanding men, but women are a whole other story. I meant she liked you.”

Delorme looked back toward the warehouse, then at Cardinal. “No way. She has a husband.”

“Touching your hand, saying she’d marry you.”

Delorme shook her head. “You are so wrong.”

“Well, why don’t you wait in the car a minute.” Donna Vaughan was waving to Cardinal from across the parking lot. “Someone I have to talk to.”

The reporter was by her car, notebook in hand. She had bought herself a thicker parka since the other day.

“Just leaving?” Cardinal said. “Or just arriving?”

“Leaving. Man, I get tired of Russians. These people are paranoid with a capital P.”

“You talked to Natalia Kuritsyn?”

“Yesterday. Kind of frisky, that one. Today I was interviewing Russian buyers. Four of these guys, all built like trucks. All from Kalinin. Spoke five words of English between them.”

“How were you able to ID the Bastovs before we were?”

“Trade secret.” She held out her wrists together. “You can tie me up and beat me. I’ll never tell.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“Actually, it was just dumb luck. I happened to be interviewing Natalia Kuritsyn when she was waiting for the Bastovs to show up. She got more and more worried, called the hotel, called the cops. Did you find the car yet?”

“We’re running that down. They may not have bothered renting one.”

“Mercury Grand Marquis. Red. Current model. They rented it from Hertz at the airport. You want the licence number?”

Cardinal laughed. “You’re good.”

“I try to be, Officer.”

As Cardinal headed back toward his car, she caught up to him from behind. She spoke breathlessly, words colliding into each other. “Listen, I hate to sound forward and everything. I’m really not a pushy person, despite how it may look. But I’m sick of eating at the hotel and I’m hoping you’ll go to dinner with me. Someplace nice. I realize you’re married and I’m not trying to pick you up. In fact, I’d love to meet your wife, so bring her too and it’ll be my treat, okay? What do you say? I can put it on expenses and it won’t even be a lie. Say yes. You can explain Algonquin Bay to me. You can talk about hockey. It’ll be fun.”

It had started to snow, and a flake landed on her eyebrow and melted there. When Cardinal and Delorme got back to the station, McLeod told them how his unrelenting devotion to duty had led him to canvass the airport rental agencies and determine the make of the Bastovs’ car. An all-units alert for the Mercury Grand Marquis was already in place.

Cardinal dialed Anton Bastov’s number again. No answer. He looked up Donna Karan, dialed the DKNY corporate headquarters and finally ascertained his whereabouts. Anton Bastov had been overcome by severe food poisoning after a return flight from Paris. He was expected to recover but was still in hospital. Cardinal got the name of the hospital and called them and was told the patient was not well enough to receive bad news or be interviewed.

Cardinal typed up his supplemental reports, wondering if he should mention Donna Vaughan in them. He decided against it. She was press, not a witness, and others had garnered the same information through the usual police footwork.

D.S. Chouinard stopped by Cardinal’s cubicle on his way out. “Word to the wise. Just had a call from the FBI’s New York office. They’re going to be sending a man up here. Special Agent Mendelsohn.”

“What for?”

“We’ve got a couple of dead American citizens and they want to have a look-see. Naturally, we’re going to be the model of international co-operation.”

At seven-thirty, Delorme put on her coat. “You want to watch a video later, or are you too tired?”

“I’m pretty beat,” Cardinal said.

“You staying all night?”

“Nah, I’m just about done.” He didn’t feel like telling Delorme about his dinner date, he wasn’t sure why.

“Who was the blonde at the warehouse?”

“Donna Vaughan. Reporter from the States.”

Delorme’s brown eyes lingered on him for a moment, then she was gone.

DeGroot’s restaurant had opened up on Main Street the year before. It couldn’t boast the elegance of Champlain’s but, with its snug wooden booths and its red plush banquettes, it did offer a pleasant mixture of privacy and conviviality. It didn’t hurt that the food was good too. When Cardinal had warned Donna that it was a steakhouse, she said, “Fine with me, Detective. I’m good with red meat.”

She was already seated in a booth when he got there. “Typical pathetic single, right? Asks the guy out, gets there first, already into the wine.”

“Pathetic is not the word that comes to mind,” Cardinal said. “You look amazing.”

He hadn’t said anything like that to any woman other than Catherine for nearly thirty years. It was completely true, of course. He wasn’t sure if it was the colour of her sweater, or something she had done to her hair, or the silver earrings.

“I’m really embarrassed now about being so forward,” she said, “and suggesting you bring your wife. I looked you up on the Internet and, boy—brilliant move, Donna.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Cardinal said. He twisted his ring. “I know I should take it off. It’s been more than a year now. But we were married a long time.”

“Yes, you would be. You’re definitely the type. Stable. Steady. Secure.” She took a sip of her wine. “Tell me something. Your last name is Native American, right? Sorry—Native Canadian.”

“In my case it comes from Scotland. My grandparents were from Fife, wherever the hell that is.” Cardinal pointed at the glass of red in her hand. “Should I order a bottle of that?”

“Definitely.”

DeGroot’s was busier than usual. It was a cold night, and diners had been drawn by the lure of comfort food, candles and a roaring fireplace. When the wine came, Donna told Cardinal how she had become a journalist. It had been a toss-up between politics and journalism, and since she couldn’t stand politicians, that had pretty much sealed her fate. After college she had worked at various small-town papers, and eventually got hired at the Post, only to get downsized out a couple of years later.

Their salads arrived, and Cardinal told her how he had become a cop. He had been young, just finishing university, studying psychology. His life had then been touched, peripherally, by a murder—a friend of a friend—and the detectives handling the case did not seem to be very good. Cardinal became involved and helped them catch the killer.

“Don’t tell me,” Donna said, holding up her salad fork. “There was a woman involved. A damsel in distress.”

Cardinal smiled.

“I knew it.” Candlelight glittered in her eyes, and something else Cardinal couldn’t quite place.

He smiled. “We got married a year later.”

Donna shook her head. “You are so Canadian.”

The waiter whisked away their salad plates and replaced them with their steaks.

“Why did you say that?” Cardinal said. “About being so Canadian?”

“Because you do these amazing things, live this amazing life, and you don’t even realize how amazing it is. How rare. An American would be telling you the high points within five minutes. He’d have a ghostwriter working on his memoirs. He’d be a consultant on a TV show.”

“In that particular case, I didn’t do anything that wasn’t completely obvious. I was still a kid, really. It’s just the detectives assigned to the case were substandard. Missed stuff they shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, but it’s how you met your wife. And then you’re married for the next God knows how long and you act like it’s just the most normal thing in the world.” She touched his hand. “Don’t ever change. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m trying to figure out if you’re always this friendly. Or if it’s because you’re a journalist and you think I can help you with your story.”

“I’m American. We’re pushy.”

Cardinal shook his head. “My wife was American and she wasn’t like that at all. But you seem to say what you’re feeling and the hell with it.”

“Go ahead. Try it.”

“Try what?”

“Say something you feel and the hell with it. Don’t worry about being a cop or being proper or being whatever. What are you feeling right now? Just tell me without thinking about it.”

“Nervous. Wary.”

Donna sat back against the booth. “You mean about my motives? Okay, that’s fair. You’re right that I definitely want all the information out of you I can possibly get. But that’s always true. I could have just made an appointment to talk to you at the office, or cornered you again at the next press conference. So if you mean my motives in asking you out to dinner, well …” She shook her head. “You’ll just have to keep guessing.”

Cardinal tilted his wineglass, studying the ruby light within. “This is the first time I’ve been out for dinner with a woman other than my wife in … decades. I don’t have a clue what to do or say.”

“Nonsense. In fact, you seem suspiciously smooth.”

“Also because you must be about a dozen years younger than me and you’re, I don’t know, radioactive or something.” Cardinal shrugged. “Why don’t you tell me what else you know about the Bastovs?”

She pushed her plate aside and sipped her wine. “Lev and Irena Bastov. Small-time buyer Irena falls in love with big-time manufacturer Lev. Two months later she marries him and moves to New York, just as her own little Russian furrier business goes belly up. What can I say? She’s a lucky girl.”

“Was everybody happy for her?”

“Ooh, you should be a reporter. Irena has a brother named Yevgeny. Apparently he was over the moon when the marriage was first announced—telling everyone Lev was going to buy his failing fur farm and set him up somewhere better, maybe get him eventually into manufacturing. His ship had finally come in. Unfortunately, he managed that fur farm into the ground and now things are not so lovey-dovey. Didn’t Ms. Kuritsyn tell you this stuff?”

“Some of it.”

“So, cut to the chase. All is connubial bliss, the Bastovs are the wonder couple of the fur trade. You see them in New York, you see them in Copenhagen, you see them in Seattle. All the major fur auctions, the two of them are there. Then, a couple of years ago, a funny thing happens on the way to the auction. This was in Copenhagen. A harvest of 460,000 mink and God knows how many other pelts goes up for sale, and guess what? Nobody bids.”

“Nobody? They hold an auction and nobody buys anything?”

“Not one fur is sold. True, we live in a globalized market, and true, we’ve had several warm winters recently. But not one fur?

“Then we get to Seattle, last year. The furs sell as well as ever. But the prices—the prices go through the floor. Even though demand—except for the Copenhagen anomaly—was more or less stable. Global warming can’t account for a drop like that. That’s when I started getting interested. I got into this fur stuff through fashion. The paper had me covering the garment industry—I can’t tell you how boring that was. Before that, they’d had me covering the art market briefly. Anyway, one day I’m doing background on the Russian fur biz and I hear a rumour that Lev and Irena have organized a bidding ring. It was just a rumour at that point. You’ve heard of bidding rings?”

“Sure,” Cardinal said. “People want to sell a painting, they get friends to bid the price way up.”

“Exactly. Difference being, here, the point was to keep the price way down. Very good position to be in if you’re a Russian manufacturer trying to compete with cheap Chinese labour. But boy, when I started asking around about that, you wouldn’t believe how people clammed up.”

“And you think they’re Russian mafia?”

“Do I think Lev’s vor? No. But some connection, definitely. Who else is going to scare an entire industry into not buying a single pelt? Could be they were pure victims. Could be they were acting on behalf of the mob and someone else got irritated. But who else is going to cut heads off and stick them on a public wharf?”

“Last I heard, the Russians were going legit.”

“They go wherever money and Russians are gathered together. Banking, energy, hockey, you name it. As far as the fur business, there’s Marat Melnick—a Brighton Beach don who has a stake in at least three major fashion houses.”

“One thing I do know about the Russian mob,” Cardinal said, “they don’t hesitate to knock off journalists.”

Donna nodded. “Fifteen, at last count.”

“That doesn’t scare you?”

“It terrifies me. In fact, if I ever publish this thing, I’ll probably have to do it under a pen name. In the meantime, as you may have noticed, I want to stay close to cops.”

Cardinal asked her if she wanted coffee or dessert, and when she said no, he signalled for the check.

She grabbed his wrist. Her fingers were hot. “Hold on a second. I gave you some pretty good information here, now you have to give me something back. That’s how this game works. You do play fair, don’t you? And it’s my check, by the way.” She produced her notebook and clicked her ballpoint several times.

“You realize I’m not allowed to talk about an investigation in progress.”

“I do.”

“You can’t use this in any paper, book, magazine, blog—anywhere—until after there’s a trial. Only after it’s part of the public record, understood?”

“Absolutely.” She raised two slim fingers. “Scout’s honour.”

“All right,” Cardinal said. “We just got this back from Toolmarks in Toronto. The weapon used to sever the heads was an axe.”

She put her notebook down. “That’s it? An axe? You call that a fair trade? Boy, you really play hardball, don’t you.”

“And the knife at the scene? You already heard about that. But it’s a Bark River Upland, a skinner’s knife—solid, not folding. The kind of blade used by hunters or trappers.”

“Hunters and trappers. Very cool.” Donna scribbled in her notebook. Cardinal was good at reading things upside down, but not this time.

“We’re not telling anybody about the make, model or type, so if this hits the papers, I’ll know who’s responsible.”

She snapped her notebook shut. “The only way I’ll be in the news, Detective, is if I get killed.”