In for a Ruble

CHAPTER 1

Everything about Sebastian Leitz was big. The man himself was six foot four and weighed two-eighty easy. A tractor tire wrapped his midsection, he wore size fourteen shoes, and nobody made gloves to fit his hands. The outsize head, with its fat pear nose, kidney-pool blue eyes and inflated inner-tube lips, made him seem larger still. The head was topped by a bushy, orange Afro that had last seen the barber when Brezhnev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A circus clown on steroids. His voice—a foghorn bass—could’ve filled a big top.

Leitz needed the big head to hold the brain. He’d earned two doctorates, mathematics and economics, from Harvard and MIT. He’d written countless papers and a half dozen books. He was a full professor at Columbia by twenty-six. People were talking Nobel Prize by thirty. That was before he quit academics and went to Wall Street to make big money.

Leitz was worth several billion, and he’d made it all himself—in little more than a decade. His hedge funds regularly ranked high on the performance charts, and Leitz himself consistently topped the compensation tables.

He had a blowback laugh and a blow-up temper. Both blew with the force of a saboteur’s bomb—unseen, unexpected, until they knocked everybody in range off their feet. As I came to find out, not everyone got back up.

He had strong opinions and was willing to state them loudly and longly if he thought there was reason to do so. Otherwise he didn’t waste breath. He ignored anyone he pegged as foolish or stupid. He didn’t give a damn what they thought of him.

Leitz had a big penchant for secrecy. No one at his firm (other than himself, of course) was allowed to take anything home from the office. An idle comment in the elevator, if it involved the company’s business, was a firing offense. He hated losing—big time. He was known to throw whatever was in reach at whomever put him on the wrong end of a trade. When I met him, he was working on the biggest deal of his life—buying and merging two of America’s TV networks, thereby taking hold of a big chunk of the media landscape. His bid had dominated the financial press and the tabloids for weeks.

Leitz was a force of nature—one of those people God or whoever is in charge put here from time to time to shake things up, make life interesting. I suppose, despite everything, that’s why I liked him. But all the size and smarts, money and privilege in the world are no guarantee you won’t fuck it up.

CHAPTER 2

I didn’t know any of this the first time we met. I didn’t know much beyond what the press told me about his TV bid—BOLD! BIG TIME! BIG BET ON THE NEW FUTURE OF OLD MEDIA!—and his wealth. The New York papers were more forthcoming than Leitz’s friend and my partner, Foster Klaus Helix, known as Foos, who arranged the meeting.

“How successful is he?” I asked.

“Leitz does okay,” Foos said.

“What’s okay?”

“Pretty good.”

“S&P was up twelve percent last year. He do better than that?”

“Some.”

“How much some?”

“Enough.”

“He’s a quantitative hedge fund manager, why’s he trying to buy TV networks?”

“Thinks he’ll make money.”

“Their current owners think they don’t make enough money. What’s Leitz going to do different?”

“Make more money.”

I let it go. I didn’t really want the meeting. I didn’t want the client. Leitz sounded like a bigger, richer, more opinionated pain in the ass than my last client, and he and his family turned out to be big trouble. But that was just an excuse. Truth be told, I didn’t feel like doing much of anything, I hadn’t in months. I was still thinking, unsuccessfully, about the woman who’d turned my life upside down before she walked out of it without even a kiss good-bye. She’d warned me she’d do that, twice, and she’d been true to her word. I couldn’t blame her. I’d done my part to show her the door. I hadn’t meant to, I’d had no choice. We’re all our own best friend and enemy, as one of our proverbs puts it.

I kept hoping against hope she’d change her mind and come back. That carried me through the first few weeks. Then I heard she’d left her job—a high-profile appointment as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, something she’d worked hard to get—and blown town. After two weeks of not wanting to get out bed, I tried to convince Foos to let me use the Basilisk to find her. Maybe if I followed wherever she’d gone, pleaded my case, recanted, promised to change, she’d see the error of her ways. I didn’t really believe it, but I had to try. Not that it mattered—Foos refused flat out.

“Who’s side are you on?” I asked.

“What makes you think I’m dumb enough to choose sides?”

“She got to you, didn’t she? Before she left. Made you promise not to help. What was the bribe? I’ll double it.”

He smiled and went back to banging on his computer keyboard. I don’t know which was worse, the depression or the frustration. I knew the Basilisk could find her. That beast can find anyone. But its master wasn’t cooperating.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” Foos said. I was doing more research in preparation for our meeting.

I ignored him on the grounds he was making me do my own homework—and I was still pissed off. I told myself Foos was right, I needed something to occupy my mind. I didn’t really believe that either, but the alternatives for the day—vodka, beer, more vodka and beer—worked in his favor.

Even before he strode upon the media stage, Leitz cut a big swath, not that hard to do in New York if you’ve got the funds. He donated his way onto the boards of the Guggenheim Museum, Carnegie Hall and his teaching alma mater, Columbia. He bought expensive pictures at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, often bidding for himself instead of hiding behind a dealer or auction house functionary. He threw high-profile parties at his East Side mansion, packed with celebrities who invested in his hedge funds. He wasn’t afraid to tell any reporter who’d listen that the government should stay the hell out of the hedge fund business. He might have been giving second thought to some of those comments, since the government—in the form of the SEC, FTC, FCC and Department of Justice—could have a lot to say about whether he was allowed to pursue the current objects of his desire. Still, not bad for a second-generation immigrant kid from Austria via Astoria.

Leitz came from a big family—a brother and two sisters, four kids in all. He lived in a double-fronted brick town house on East Sixty-second Street, to which he’d added the brownstones on either side, giving him twelve windows across the front—a ton of real estate anywhere, an enormity in Manhattan. I guess he needed room for his two kids (from two wives), housekeeper, nanny, and pair of Bernese mountain dogs, which I initially mistook for small Saint Bernards and was quickly corrected.

Foos had known Leitz before he became rich, when they were both ordinary, working-stiff, academic geniuses. They’d met at some conference of eggheads while Foos was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Leitz at Columbia. Probably struck up a friendship over the lunch buffet—the two biggest brains and bodies in the room. Both left academics soon afterward, Leitz to Wall Street and Foos to move modern data mining forward several decades in as many years.

After Foos sold his company, he gave Leitz some of his fortune to invest along with a chunk of the assets of the foundation he endowed and runs—STOP, short for “Stop Terrorizing Our Privacy.” I’d read Leitz required a minimum investment of $5 million and regularly racked up returns north of 30 percent a year, after fees of 3 percent of assets under management and the first 30 percent of profits earned. Fees were another big thing about him.

When I asked Foos about that, I got the usual, “Leitz does okay.”

I gave up. I checked STOP’s records, which I’m entitled to do since I’m the other member of the board, although Foos neglects to send me financial reports—or any other reports for that matter. I don’t know how much of STOP’s money Leitz invested, since the assets could be spread among multiple managers. STOP’s most recent tax return, which I downloaded from the Internet, showed total assets of $208 million. It started with $50 million five years ago. The markets had tanked in the interim. Leitz indeed appeared to be doing okay.

On our way uptown, I again pressed Foos about his friend.

“What happened to the first Mrs. Leitz?”

“Bad scene.”

“You know her?”

“A little.”

“How bad?”

“The worst.”

“And wife number two?”

“Jenny. She’s cute. Smart too.”

“Bad? Cute? Smart? Care to add a little color?”

“Not my business.”

He looked out the window, and we rode in silence the rest of the way. In the twenty years I’d spent with the KGB, I’d never heard of anyone standing up against a full-bore Cheka interrogation. Given the chance, Foos could’ve been the first.

Someone had left the Post on the cab’s backseat. NEW BIDDERS EXPECTED IN TV WAR, the headline read. The story cited Wall Street sources, all unnamed, stating that several consortia, involving everyone from Warren Buffet to Bill Gates to a couple of Chinese billionaires, were in the process of putting together offers to rival Leitz’s. Wall Street was in full M&A—merger and acquisition—frenzy. The fees alone were expected to run into the hundreds of millions. The ensuing battle could last months.

Normally, I’m as caught up as the next guy in stories like this one, events that promise change and upheaval in the landscape—economic, social and cultural—of my adopted country. My natural curiosity (a character trait I’ve never tried hard to tame) would be working overtime at the prospect of meeting the man who’d set it in motion. But today as I read the story, noted the names, registered the humongous amounts of cash involved, I felt no spark. Whatever Leitz wanted didn’t matter much. He might occupy my time, perhaps a bit of my attention, for a day, a week or a month, but he and his bidding war wouldn’t do a damned thing to alter the fucked-up mess that had become my life.

At the corner of Madison and Sixty-second, Foos paid the driver. We walked half a block east. The morning was bright and crisp, not too cold for the second week of January. The remnants of a New Year’s storm lined the sidewalks, mostly frozen slush now, covered with a coat of city grime, nothing compared with the three feet of black encrusted snow I’d left in Moscow back before Christmas.

Leitz’s spread was almost precisely midblock, on the north side of the street. A handsome six-story brick house at the center, with cream-colored trim. Half the façade was flat-fronted, half formed a graceful bay, as if the architect had tried to make one house look like two. Avoiding ostentation perhaps. The rest of the expanded mansion comprised two traditional New York brownstones on either side. Foos pushed a brass button by the black door, and a Filipina answered. She smiled hello, ushered us inside, and offered to take our coats.

We stood in a stone-floored, chandeliered entrance hall that occupied the full width and half the depth of the double brick house. An elliptical staircase swirled upward at the center. The hall was hung as a portrait gallery—nineteenth century European, maybe a few American, paintings covered three of four walls. One picture caught my eye, a handsome, bearded man in his late thirties. I went over for a closer look. It was what I thought—a self-portrait by Ilya Repin, probably painted in the 1880s. I’d seen one like it at the Tretyakov in Moscow. The Met has a couple of Repin’s works, but they’re hard to find outside Russia. Leitz was becoming a little more interesting.

Foos came up beside me. “Nice picture.”

“We’ve got some good painters. He’s one.”

“Not surprised. Leitz knows his stuff.”

“Please, gentlemen, upstairs. Mr. Sebastian waits.” The maid stood by the staircase pointing. We followed her direction.

Carpeted wood steps, painted balusters and a smooth mahogany banister climbed all six stories. On the second floor, two sets of double doors opened off the central hall into a high-ceilinged, paneled room in the front. I got off to take a look. It ran the width of the brick house—six windows—with a marble fireplace at each end. The furniture was a mixture of English and French antiques. A Picasso cubist still life hung over one fireplace in refined revolutionary conversation with a Braque over the other. Matisse, Cézanne and Manet graced the other walls.

“One more flight, boys, the inner sanctum,” a loud voice called, and I returned to the stairs to see a large head of curly reddish-blond hair flopping over the railing from above. Foos was already halfway up. I followed, regretting not being able to spend more time with the paintings in the drawing room. But I didn’t know what was to come.

On the third floor, off the stairs, I came face-to-face with a huge Rothko color field—blue and red and purple. The closeness and intensity took me aback, until I realized that beside me was another one of the same size—yellow, orange, and red. I turned slowly around the hall. There were four of them, one for each wall, and the impact was overwhelming, a whirling cocoon of color, too close and too bright, and much too deep, to take in all at once.

Foos passed through unaffected. He’d been here before. I spun in my spot, trying to establish myself and get some perspective. It wasn’t possible. Three-dimensional hypnosis. I had to fight to break the spell and pull my eyes from the color, infinite in its intensity. I turned to the red-haired man in the doorway.

He was smiling. “People say it’s over the top, but I like a real kick in the ass.”

“You got that, all right,” I said, extending my hand, head still spinning

His paw enveloped mine in a tight grip. “Sebastian Leitz. Come in.”

This room was as big as the one on the floor below, also paneled, but in blond wood with clean, contemporary lines. Fireplaces at both ends again, but these had simple, limestone mantels with no frills or decoration. Wood fires burned in both. The paintings were contemporary too—Franz Kline held down one end, Robert Motherwell the other, two more heavyweights thrashing out their own generation of abstraction. But it was the top right corner, above the desk, that caught my eye. A smallish canvas, compared with the others, eighteen inches by three feet, highlighted by a single spot. A collection of blue, yellow, red, green, and brown rectangles floating on a white background.

I remembered the painting—and where I’d first seen it. Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, painted in 1916. I’d gone to look at it at Sotheby’s a few years ago, right before it sold for $80 million. I raised an eyebrow at the buyer. He nodded.

“Not many people get that. But you’re Russian, right? Not Black Square, but the best I could do.”

“You did well. It’s… You know as well as I do—words are hard to come by.”

For my money, Malevich is the greatest of Russian painters, one of the greatest of all painters, and along with Kandinsky, perhaps, the first real abstractionist anywhere. Leitz had placed the picture in the traditional position of an icon in a Russian house, just as Malevich himself had done with his most famous painting, Black Square, when he showed it for the first time in 1915, declaring, none too subtly, a thousand years of representational painting passé.

“Thank you. It’s my favorite picture.”

“I like the Repin downstairs too.”

He gave me a look that indicated I’d passed some kind of test. “You’re the first to recognize that. Come sit by the fire.”

Leitz led the way to a group of black leather Le Corbusier club chairs under the Motherwell. Foos lounged in one. At the other end of the room, under Kline’s big, brutal, black brushstrokes, two flat screens sat on a desk and a row of monitors were embedded in the paneled wall. They flickered with red and green and blue, too far away to see the actual numbers.

Foos poured himself a cup of coffee from a chrome thermos without waiting to be asked and lifted an eyebrow at me. I shook my head. Leitz already had a cup in front of him.

I looked from one to the other while I waited to see who would speak first. Since I was a guest, and wasn’t sure I even wanted to be here, I had no reason to get the ball rolling.

Leitz was wearing an XXL cashmere sweater, dark green, suede patches on the elbows, over a gray T-shirt, along with baggy brown corduroys that hadn’t seen an iron or press in weeks. His shoes stood out. Elegant, dark brown wingtips, English or Italian, I couldn’t tell which, well worn but freshly shined and in great shape. Foos was dressed as Foos always dresses—black sweater, black jeans, black boots. His mane of black curly hair was a little frizzed in the cold air and showing a bit of gray. He’d had a few inches trimmed for the New Year, one of his few concessions to the calendar, but it still hung thickly well past his shoulders. His black eyes looked at me from behind black, chunky glasses. His big pointed nose ran left to right from my position, and since his mouth opens mostly on the right side, it makes his whole face lopsided. He was as tall as Leitz and a few pounds lighter. Leitz’s weight settled around his middle, while Foos’s hung evenly from his shoulders, which I’ve never understood since I’ve never seen him do anything remotely resembling exercise.

I was wearing my winter uniform—black turtleneck and dark gray flannel trousers. I’d handed in my black leather jacket downstairs. I had a comfortable pair of English-made loafers on my feet that probably cost less than Leitz’s socks. In the spring I trade the turtleneck for a T-shirt, the leather and flannel for linen, and I don’t have to worry about what to put on for another six months. The injuries I’d suffered last June—some at the hands of my old friend and nemesis, Lachko Barsukov, some at my own—had healed, and I’d worked myself back into pretty good shape, despite too much vodka and beer. I was showing no flab on my six-foot, two-hundred pound frame. Since Victoria left, no one was around to complain if I was carrying extra weight, but staying in shape is a vanity like any other—and one of mine, the result of a half-starved youth when making it through the day was no better than a fifty-fifty bet. Victoria said she liked my brown eyes—they had a curious sparkle—straight-ahead nose and squared-off triangle of a chin. My hair, once bushy and black, had thinned to the point of a sixty-year-old by my late twenties, in my mind the result of the same youthful malnourishment. I’d shaved my scalp and kept it that way. Today, it was probably showing some red from the cold air outside. I hadn’t worn a hat.

Nobody said anything for several minutes, an unusual occurrence in America—or anywhere. Leitz looked at me, I looked at the paintings. Foos might have taken a cat nap. Three men, content to take silent stock. Nine times out of ten—ninety-nine times out of a hundred—someone has to fill the void. Not today. I’m used to this treatment from Foos—we can go days without much more than grunting at each other—but Leitz intrigued me by saying nothing. When he was ready, he broke the silence.

“Thank you for coming to visit. Foos told me a little of your background. You’ve had an interesting life.”

“Sounds like he’s told you more than he’s told me.” I smiled to show I meant no offense. Leitz smiled back.

“I require all of my clients to sign confidentiality agreements which my lawyers drafted expressly to prohibit people from talking about me or my business. Foos is one of the few who abides by his word.”

“With him, you didn’t need the agreement.”

Leitz chuckled. “I told my lawyers the same thing.”

Foos said, “You guys going to talk business or shall I go hang with Jenny while you get acquainted?”

“Patient too,” Leitz said. “How much do you really know about me, Mr. Vlost?”

“Call me Turbo. Only what I read in the papers, which Foos tells me not to believe.”

Leitz chuckled again.

I took the bait, maybe because the pictures had me interested. “You run a hedge fund, a family of funds, actually, with assets of some twenty billion. You’re very successful. So successful that a few years ago, you returned half the money you manage to your clients, whether they wanted it back or not. You said you couldn’t keep earning the kind of returns you and they were used to. I’m guessing that also meant you couldn’t keep charging the fees you and they were used to, which are supposed to be the highest in the industry.”

He nodded but said nothing.

“That pissed a bunch of them off, which must be a peculiarly American irony—wealthy people getting angry because someone gave them their money back.”

He smiled and nodded again. “So far, you’re very well informed.”

“You have a reputation for secrecy. Your investors have no idea what you’re doing with their money. You’re known for being mercurial, I’ve seen less complimentary terms used too. You get away with it because of the returns you generate. You’re what Wall Street calls a rocket scientist. You use your mathematical skills to make big bets in the financial markets and you’re right more often than you’re wrong.”

“That’s essentially correct, except the word ‘bets’ connotes gambling. I don’t gamble, not with my clients’ money. The markets are highly efficient, but they’re not perfect. I develop mathematical models that identify small inefficiencies. My investments count on these inefficiencies correcting themselves in time, which they almost always do. The investments are market neutral—I might go long in a convertible bond and short the underlying stock, for example—so I don’t care whether the market goes up or down.”

I heard this before. I’d also heard there’s no such thing as a free lunch. “Care to explain that little collapse back in 2008?”

He sighed the sigh of someone who’s been asked the same question too many times.

“In the early days, we and a few others had the playing field mostly to ourselves, and we did quite well. Imitation being the purest form of flattery, it didn’t take too long before other smart people figured out what we were up to and piled into the game. Some tried to copy us, either by imitating our moves or developing their own models and software, and a number pursued other strategies. Too much money chasing not enough deals. Made finding new inefficiencies harder and less profitable, the reason, as you say, we reduced the size of the funds we manage. There was also too much leverage. Cheap credit’s like an addictive drug—the users keep taking more and more to achieve the same high. Eventually they OD. Cut off the supply, same thing happens. When the shakeout came, a lot of people got hurt. We actually made money. We were up twelve percent in 2008 and forty-three percent in 2009, thirty-five percent last year.”

“Sounds like competition to me.”

“I have no problem with competition. It makes my job more difficult, but that’s the nature of capitalism. My problem is theft.”

Foos grunted his approval—we were finally somewhere.

“My business is all computers,” Leitz said. “They run the models, access the markets for information, crunch the numbers, identify opportunities. Everybody works this way. The amount of information to be gathered and processed is way more than any individual or group of individuals could handle. The competitive advantage therefore is in the modeling and the software—and the cost of capital.”

“Somebody has to provide the modeling and software. Or have the computers learned to do that themselves?”

He laughed. “No, that’s where we mortals still add value, at least for the time being. But we’re hostage to the electronic executioners of the strategies we develop. We can’t operate without them. So we go to substantial lengths to make sure they’re secure. A few months ago, we were subjected to an attempted break-in, electronic.”

“Brute-force attack,” Foos said. “Somebody used their own computer to run the possible password combinations for one of Sebastian’s employees. Could’ve worked, but fortunately he changes passwords every week and the bad guy’s computer was a little slow. Whoever it was tried again, twice, but I suggested some improvements in encryption and a few other areas, and they didn’t get very far. Things should stay copasetic in the near term, but there ain’t no panaceas in this business.”

“This related to the TV bid?”

“I’m assuming it is.”

“Anything like this happen before?”

“No.

“Any idea who’d try it?”

“Another bidder, or prospective bidder. Lots of rumors out there. Competitor, maybe. Disgruntled investor. Someone with a grudge against hedge funds. Plenty of those out there too. Maybe just a hacker.”

“No hackers anymore who aren’t in it for profit,” Foos said.

“You do anything recently to piss anyone off?” I asked.

“Like make them take their money back? No.” He laughed.

“Tell me about the TV bid.”

His face darkened. “What do you mean?”

“Why you’re in it. This is hardly a bet—sorry, trade—based on market inefficiencies.”

The darkness lifted, replaced by inquisitiveness. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but how much do you know about capital markets?”

“Marx identified three essential elements of capitalism—capital, labor, and markets. I’ve studied their interrelationships, albeit perhaps from a different perspective than yours.”

He chuckled. “Fair enough. But Marx left one element out—cash.”

“I appreciate cash. It’s why I don’t keep much money in the markets.”

He laughed again. “Good for you. Then you’ll understand where I’m coming from. A different perspective, as you say. Everyone focuses on TV networks as businesses in long-term decline. Competition from cable channels, the Internet, video games, not to mention good old evolving demographics. No question about it, long-term outlook sucks. That’s a technical term. Not a business most companies, especially growth-oriented public companies, want to be in anymore.”

“So?”

“Cash. It’s still a cash-rich business. You have any idea how much cash one network throws off in a year? Billions. Now think about two. Then think about two, merged, redundancies and overlaps removed, market share enhanced, if only because there are now three where there were four. In cash flow terms, one plus one equals three, maybe three and a half. You got cash like that, you got options, in a capitalist way of thinking, of course.”

“In any way of thinking. I’m still keeping most of my money in the mattress. How come nobody else figured this out?”

“I’m sure they have, especially now that I’ve shown a spotlight on it. That’s why I expect competition. Cash flow is a commodity, like any other. The difference between success and failure in this deal is price, how much you pay to acquire that cash flow. I think my analysis is better, more productive, than anyone else’s is likely to be. If you were getting into the game, it would be helpful to know what the other guy’s planning to do, wouldn’t it?”

“So you think that’s what’s going on?”

“Timing suggests it is. So does the amount of money involved. It’s enough to attract someone with the kind of resources this guy seems to have.”

“And you want me to find this guy?”

“That would be ideal, of course, but I’m not naïve. I’m more concerned about security. Foos says we’re secure, and I believe him. He also says, no panaceas, as you just heard. I want you to put yourself in this guy’s shoes and see if you can find a way in.”

CHAPTER 3

I still didn’t want the job. Foos was staring straight at me, all but imploring—take it, you need something to do. He was trying to kill two birds with one stone—help Leitz and give me something to occupy a troubled mind. Well-meaning friends can be a real pain in the ass.

Nowhere near the pain I’d been in since Moscow, though. I’d gone in December hoping it would change my mood. Not much traction before the family roof caved in once again.

I got reacquainted—more accurately, acquainted—with my son, Aleksei, as we started to fill in the thirty years since the time I’d left him and my ex-wife. “Abandoned” is his word, “thrown out” is mine, but we’ve agreed to disagree. That we found each other was fate at work, especially since Polina and I didn’t talk after the split, and I’d moved to New York back in 1992. There was a price to be paid, of course—if you’re Russian there’s always a price—in this case, the death of his mother. I didn’t feel guilt or sadness. She was a tortured soul, and she’d done more than her share of harm—mostly to me. I didn’t see why he should either, since she truly had abandoned him, but try telling that to a son about his mother.

This was all maybe manageable, although Aleksei wasn’t making it easy. My attempts to find some kind of roadmap to rapport were running into a major roadblock—the Cheka, known today as the FSB, known to most as the KGB (its longest running incarnation), known previously by multiple names and acronyms, but all anyone needs to know is that they all stand for state security. The specific problem was my connection to the Cheka, my employer for twenty years, which my son presumed was as strong as ever, despite ample evidence to the contrary. That made the kick in the gut Sasha delivered, the one I was still trying to work through, all the more devastating.

I’ve been doing long-distance research for years into an unknown past—wondering if it was truly unknowable. The Gulag, where I’d grown up, did a few things well. One was eviscerate its victims’ lives. Another was keep records. The records still exist, in the archives of the Cheka. I’ve been working, in secret, with an archivist I know only as Sasha, who’s helped many people uncover their pasts. My mother’s history was relatively easy to reconstruct, from what I’d been told as a child and from Gulag documents. There was a brief period in the chaos of the early 1990s when things opened up, even at Lubyanka, and Sasha was able to unearth a little information about my presumed father, then the Cheka flexed its still considerable muscle, and the doors to the archives slammed shut. Numerous questions about my parentage remained unanswered. Sasha had managed a breakthrough last summer, but he and the new information ran afoul of Lachko Barsukov. Before I figured out that Lachko wasn’t my only Barsukov nemesis, Sasha had to go underground. When he surfaced and felt safe, I booked a flight to Moscow. I had a bad feeling about what awaited me there, and I wasn’t wrong, but I wanted out of New York, away from Victoria’s memory. For some reason, I keep thinking distance can dull the pain of the past.

Sasha met me for dinner a few days after I arrived.

“I never should be telling you this,” he said. “You’re not ready, nobody could be. There’s a chance I’m not right, but I can’t follow up. It’s a new world at Lubyanka since I got back. Everything’s locked up tighter than ever. You need special clearance. Orders from the Kremlin. Some say from the man himself.”

The man would be Comrade Putin, whose positions in the New Russia have included president and prime minister, but whose power is more akin to that of general secretary of the Communist Party in the old days. Even after he entered politics, Putin remained first and foremost a Chekist.

Sasha slid a piece of paper across the table and stared into his glass. “It looks like we were wrong, and this is your father, your real father.” He didn’t want to say it. I can’t blame him.

I unfolded the paper.

Two initials and a name.

L. P. Beria.

I spent Christmas back in New York, researching what I could about Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, thinking about Aleksei and trying not to think about Victoria. Not necessarily in that order. It’s funny—growing up in the Gulag, there weren’t any holidays to celebrate. When I was an adult in the Soviet Union, Christmas wasn’t observed. When I moved to New York, I lived alone, and I didn’t pay much attention. But this year, for the first time, as I walked the streets amid the holiday decorations and preparations, I felt lonely. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. For all I knew, Victoria didn’t even like Christmas. She’d lived alone much of her life too. All I wanted was to be able to ask her.

Progress with Aleksei might have cut the blues, but he’d walked out on our second dinner together when he found out how deeply the Cheka runs in his lineage and declined to meet again. I couldn’t fault him. The Cheka was the one Soviet institution to make the transition to so-called Russian democracy with little loss of power. What was once known as the state within the state became in many ways the state itself once Putin took power, and it ruled with the same tools it had long used so successfully—fear, intimidation, violence, and making absolutely certain its own interests came first. As an officer with the Russian Criminal Prosecution Service, which wages a form of David-and-Goliath institutional warfare against its much more powerful rival, Aleksei viewed all Chekists as enemies for life. Like many, he also blamed the Cheka for the problems with the New Russia, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. Or even mostly. I kept trying to demonstrate that my departure from the organization was complete and total and twenty years earlier, but he inherited my stubborn streak, at least on that subject.

All of which meant it was going to take time for him to figure out what he really thought of me—I understood that—but I wasn’t prepared to wait another couple of decades for the result. I understood equally well that to push it would shove him in the wrong direction. One more situation whose outcome I couldn’t do a damned thing about, which just added to the general depression.

Then there was Beria—the Soviet Union’s most brutal butcher, head of the Cheka from 1938 to 1953, serial rapist, Stalin’s favorite executioner—and the idea that he could be my father. He doesn’t look like a bad man—ski-jump nose, receding hair line, cleft chin, and rimless spectacles. Looks can be deceiving. But did I look like him?

Since Sasha’s revelation, Lavrenty Pavlovich has taken to putting in periodic appearances in my consciousness, showing up unannounced, often in uniform, usually wearing a mocking grin. I’m not that familiar with apparitions, although lots of my fellow zeks saw them all the time in the camps. Murdered sons, daughters, or parents. Loved ones left behind. Relatives who’d vanished, just as they themselves had done. Sometimes the visions were causes of comfort, other times, fear. Beria didn’t comfort, he didn’t scare either. There was a time when the mere mention of his name could cause unchecked terror, but he’d been dead for sixty years. Old ghosts aren’t that scary. Mostly he mocked—with well-chosen words and that grin. The first few times, I was mildly concerned with my state of mind, but I put the visions down to too much vodka and the head injury I’d given myself last summer when, a day after being beaten senseless, I’d cracked my skull on a glass coffee table. After the first few appearances, Lavrenty Pavlovich and I reached our own détente—he showed up when he chose, and he mostly left when I told him to.

Information on Beria the man was hard to come by, beyond the essential facts of his career. Head of the Georgian secret police, secretary of the Communist Party in Georgia, then for the Transcaucasian region, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, deputy head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), member of the Politburo, commissar general of state security, overseer of purges, murders, and crimes too numerous to count. Stalin is supposed to have introduced him to Roosevelt at Yalta as “our Himmler.”

Beria hasn’t received the attention most mass murderers get, and what was out there wasn’t necessarily reliable. A couple of biographies (one overly florid, the other too dry), some academic papers, but not much that told me about the man. I could have gone back to Russia, but I’d find less information there. The current powers are schizophrenic in their treatment of history, particularly the Stalin era. On the one hand, they want it remembered as a great patriotic age—the time when the Soviet Union became a major twentieth-century power and, at enormous sacrifice, turned the tide of the Great Patriotic War. This is true, so far as it goes. But buying into Stalin as icon requires turning a blind eye to the greatest crimes against humanity this side of Nazi Germany, crimes that Russia as a nation—Russians as a people—have never come to terms with. So we try, with the active participation of our leaders, to sweep them under the rug, hoping in time, I suppose, that the world will forget. One reason there’s little information available about the perpetrators, including Comrade Beria, and much of what there is has been locked away.

I badgered Sasha periodically by phone and e-mail, but the answer was the same—no clearance, no access. I was stuck in genealogical limbo, hoping for the opposite of a smoking gun. No way to move things forward with Aleksei until I found it—or didn’t. Unable even to look, I got more and more gloomy.

Seeking diversion, I pestered Foos about the Basilisk and Victoria. He just shook his curly mane and ignored me. He’s good at that. But I got on his nerves and that’s one reason he took me to see Leitz.

“I’m not a computer expert,” I said to Leitz.

“I got that end covered,” Foos said.

“A bunch of firms do this kind of thing for a living,” I argued. “Network protection, cyber-security, hackers for hire. This is right up their line.”

“I don’t know them and I don’t trust them. There’s also the issue of publicity. I don’t want any. Foos says I can trust you.”

“‘Trust’ and ‘qualifications’ have different definitions in the dictionary.”

Leitz shook his head. “Foos knows everything anyone needs to know about computers. He tells me you’ve been in jail and you used to be a spy. You have a shot at knowing how someone like this thinks. That’s the most important qualification I can think of.”

I looked at Foos. “How much did you tell him?”

“The basics.”

Leitz said, “He told me you have what we call a checkered past—in and out of jail in the Soviet Union until you caught the attention of the KGB. You speak half a dozen languages, a valuable skill. You served twenty years in the most elite department of one of the world’s most successful espionage organizations, including several tours here in the States. He says you have an unconventional mind and you’re choosy about your clients. He hinted he might have some leverage in that regard.”

I was still looking at Foos. “That mean what I think it means?”

“Maybe.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Leitz’s summary was accurate as far as it went. The jail he referred to was the Gulag, the network of prison, forced labor, and death camps established by the Bolsheviks, expanded beyond comprehension under Stalin and maintained by his successors up until the end. I was born in the Dalstroi camps, in Siberia, my mother having been sent away twice, the first time for doing nothing, the second time for being arrested the first time. I’d worked hard to overcome my past, including having the official record of my birth and subsequent arrest and imprisonment erased, but I still know I’m a zek—the most shameful thing a Russian can be. Unless he’s also the son of Lavrenty Beria.

Keep things in the present. “Foos tell you what I charge?”

“He was vague about that.”

“Normally, I get hired to find things—people, valuables, money. I take a third of their value as my fee.”

Leitz laughed. It filled the room, pushing at the walls. “I can’t argue with that. I more or less charge the same thing. But if we assume this is about the TV deal, we’re talking about a sixty-five-billion-dollar transaction. A third of that…”

“Could be real money.”

Leitz laughed some more. Maybe it was his brains, maybe it was his success, but I could tell I was dealing with someone totally comfortable in his own skin. You don’t meet many people like that.

“You said you appreciate cash,” he said. “Tell me how much you want—within reason.”

I shook my head. If this was meant as a way to take my mind off my troubles, I might as well have some fun with it.

“I don’t get paid unless I’m successful. But if I am—that is to say, if I find a way in and access your data—I’ll take a painting as my fee.”

He looked skeptical. “You know the value of some of these works…”

“Is more than twenty billion?”

He laughed again, quietly this time. “Point taken. Which painting?”

His eyes went to the Malevich, mine followed, but I knew that was a nonstarter. I thought about the Rothkos outside, but it would be a shame to break up that quartet. I like both Kline and Motherwell, but while I don’t work cheap, I’m not a gouger.

“I’ll take the Repin.”

He didn’t hide his surprise. “There are many more valuable works…”

“It’s an arbitrage opportunity. I figure the market will catch up.”

He grinned at that. “That was my assumption when I bought it—six years ago. So far, it hasn’t worked out.”

“You made a bad trade. Here’s your chance to get out.”

“I wouldn’t say bad. I happen to enjoy the picture. But if that’s what you want…”

“Done.”

Foos was chuckling, shaking his head as we walked down the block.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“You, man. What else? You mope around for months—no focus, no energy. You say you’re depressed. Can’t get it up for anything. You go home to the old country, come back in worse shape than ever. You’re a total pain in the ass, not to put too fine a point on it. So I set you up with the smartest guy on Wall Street, and it takes you maybe ten minutes to size him up and play him for a sucker. They teach this in spy school?”

“Your friend Leitz is looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. A common problem, as he pointed out.”

“I wouldn’t remind him about the common part, if I were you. He’s already gonna be plenty pissed and he’s got a big-ass temper.”

“I always follow your advice. When are you going to let me at the Basilisk?”

“Soon, like I said. How long you going to take to do this job?”

I shrugged. “You got me into this. How long you want me to take?”

Foos grinned. “He’s let this TV deal go to his head. Thinks he’s a big shot. Go for maximum impact.”

“In that case, we should be in sometime tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 4

The Sam Ash musical instrument empire anchors the Times Square end of West Forty-eighth Street between Seventh and Sixth and evokes, in a cramped quarter block, New York of a different era. Low-rise brick and stone buildings, coated with decades of grit and grime, windows jammed with guitars, amps, drums and horns—all carrying SALE! signs screaming about deals beyond belief. I could imagine A. J. Liebling and his telephone-booth Indians hanging out in the neighborhood, as they had a half century earlier, hustling tourists, eating at cheap luncheonettes, drinking in seedy bars, hitting the occasional nightclub when they wanted to strut their stuff. If I worked the imagination harder, Miles and Bird and Diz played the “52nd Street Theme” in the background. I could even hear Symphony Sid’s midnight radio broadcasts from the original Birdland—the Metropolitan Bopera House, as he called it—just four blocks up Broadway. The streets would have been full of men in wide-striped suits and fedoras, their women wearing tight dresses with flared skirts and heels. At least that’s how I saw it, from the records of the bop era, the writings of Liebling and others, and movies of the period. By the first time I arrived in New York, 1977, that era was long over, and a sea of sex shops drowned the area in sleaze.

It took a few decades, but the city drove the sex emporia away (or at least to other neighborhoods) and the developers moved in, toting tax incentives and architectural plans for new skyscrapers, each bigger and uglier than the last. Once built, they pulled off the dubious accomplishment of evoking nostalgia for the strip joints and peep shows. My destination was one of those office towers, but it was only 6:30 P.M., and I had time to kill before one New York work day came to an end and another began. I could have spent a wistful hour in a bar, but one vodka led too easily to another these days, and I told myself I was working, which required a clear mind. So I strolled the streets, thinking about the past—near and far—and reminding myself jobs are not all that easy to come by, and I should be grateful I had one. I’m good at rationalizing, less so at listening to myself when I do. I tried to focus on the Repin portrait and where I was going to hang it. That made me feel a little bit better.

I walked around a crowded Times Square, half the people on the street heading home after work, the other beginning their evening out. I heard at least a dozen languages, tourists enjoying the bright lights of the Great White Way—one of New York’s enduring sights. Except the lights left me cold these days, partly because of my frame of mind, but mostly because the heart of the place had been gutted. The old Times Square neon had character and seedy charm. These lights were as soulless and airbrushed as the buildings they were mounted on.

An enormous baritone saxophone, five vertical feet of tangled brass, a shiny relic of Liebling’s bygone era, caught my eye in the Sam Ash window. It carried a SALE! tag of $4799! I stopped to contemplate the economics of the musical instrument business. Not much call for baritone sax players these days, or any days, yet to get in the game required an upfront investment of nearly five grand, not to mention the cost of learning to play the thing. This was one of those instances when capitalism didn’t add up, at least not to an ex-socialist. In the Soviet Union, the instrument would have been owned by the state and used by an individual of appropriate interest and skill. There would have been a perceived benefit to society, justifying the expense, of having well-trained and -equipped baritone saxophone players—if only because the West had them too, and we had to keep up. Here the cost was borne entirely by the misguided person who fell in love with the baritone sax—as opposed to, say, the piano, violin or, better yet, electric guitar—with little hope of recouping his investment, at least through use of the instrument. But maybe, as Leitz said, I was looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. I’d have to ask him.

I continued along the block to the east. The height of the buildings rose as I approached Sixth Avenue, from five stories to fifty. The materials changed too, from dirty brick to steel and glass and shiny marble. I stopped across from number 140, half a billion dollars worth of concrete, steel, stone, and glass—and no aesthetic merit whatsoever. The lobby was gray and white and blue marble. The directory told me Leitz Ahead Investments—my client appeared to share my view that any pun was better than none—occupied the forty-second and forty-third floors. The lobby guard was checking IDs and issuing passes. I might have bluffed my way past, but I didn’t need to. I returned to the opposite side of Forty-eighth Street, found a wall to lean against, put my cell phone to my ear and pretended to be deep in conversation while I watched the door.

Around 7:30, small groups of Hispanic men and women started to form on the sidewalk. They arrived in twos and threes, from the subway stations east and west, some still carrying their unfinished evening meal. They talked quietly among themselves. By 7:50, there were more than twenty, and if there was a single green card among them, I was ready to buy the whole bunch dinner. These were the cleaning crews for the building, workers for a contract company that paid minimum wage with no benefits, but asked no questions about place of birth, legal residence, or Social Security. That made them easy prey.

I wasn’t looking to exploit vulnerability. When I was in the spy business, I always found incentives bought better cooperation than threats—one of many reasons I’m an ex-socialist. I crossed the street and moved quickly from group to group, speaking Spanish, repeating the same speech. “Good evening. I apologize for disturbing you. I am not from the police or government. I have a five-hundred-dollar offer for the person who cleans floors forty-two and forty-three and a hundred dollars for the man or woman who introduces me. I will return here tomorrow night at this time. That is the last time any of you will need to see me. Thank you for your assistance. Good night.”

It took less than five minutes, by which time they were starting to drift inside. Work started at 8:00 P.M. I walked off to the east without looking back. They would be suspicious, a few even frightened. But six hundred dollars was a lot of money. I was all but certain to have the man or woman I needed tomorrow night.

I arrived back at 140 West 48th Street at 7:15 P.M., Wednesday. The cleaners started to gather around 7:30, just like the night before. I waited in the same spot, not bothering with the fake phone call. At 7:40, one of them broke away from his group and went to talk to a man in another. The body language of the second man said he wanted nothing to do with his coworker and, I assumed, by extension with me. The first man was whispering fiercely, gesturing with his arms, getting more and more animated. He was an excitable type. He wanted his hundred-dollar bounty. The other guy just shook his head. The rest of the cleaners moved away. I gave brief thought to crossing the street and intervening, but I had no idea why the second man was hesitant, and I’d more than likely queer the deal, assuming there was a deal to queer.

After a few more minutes the first man broke away and, looking up and down the block, walked across to me.

“I am sorry, señor,” he said in Spanish as he approached. “My friend is the man you want but… he is a timid soul, he is frightened. I have tried to persuade him you are an honorable man who means no harm, but he says it is too big a risk. The money…” He looked me straight in the eye and shrugged.

I stifled a chuckle. The supposed argument across the street was an act—a charade for my benefit—with the sole purpose of setting up a negotiation. These twenty-first-century telephone-booth Indians were true to the spirit of their predecessors.

“I understand perfectly,” I said, holding the man’s eye. “But my patience is not infinite. Seven hundred for your friend. Two hundred for you. I’m leaving in two minutes.”

The man nodded quickly and trotted back across the street.

This time there was no argument, just thirty seconds of quiet conversation before the two men came to me. The first man was smiling. The second still looked fearful. His eyes darted up and down the block. I shook hands with both of them but didn’t ask their names. They didn’t inquire after mine. I dubbed them Bold and Timid.

I asked Timid how many floors Leitz Ahead Investments occupied. He looked up and down the block again before answering, “Two.” I asked him to describe them. He depicted a double-height, glassed-in trading room with workstations and computer screens around the perimeter of an enormous table and surrounded by offices and conference rooms on both levels. I asked about the computers. That stumped him. The best I could get was lots of screens connected to boxes under the big table. Good enough for me. Leitz would have the trading floor outfitted with high-powered workstations, networked to servers and data storage that could be on another floor or in another location altogether. I took a small device from my pocket. It looked like a black electronic tollbooth tag, about two inches square, two-sided tape on the back.

“I want you to pick one of the computer boxes in the middle of the big table,” I said. “Not close to the edge, further underneath, you understand?” We were speaking Spanish, and he nodded, hanging on my every word. “Peel off these strips and stick this to the back of the box, out of sight, okay?” He nodded again.

“That’s it,” I said, reaching for my wallet. A new look came into Timid’s eyes, not fear this time, but uncertainty.

“Something wrong?” I asked as gently as I could. “Do you want to go over it again?”

He shook his head and looked up and down the block once more.

“What then?” I said.

“It’s just…” He paused, unsure. The bold one, impatient, told him to spit it out. I smiled to show I was in no hurry.

Timid gathered up his courage. “I am sorry, señor, but I am confused. Do you want me to put this on the same machine as the other one?”

CHAPTER 5

I got to Grand Central and thought about turning left or right. Right meant downtown and either back to the office or home alone and another night of vodka and takeout food and fruitless research into my past. I turned left, took the subway up to Eighty-sixth Street and walked over to Trastevere. Giancarlo greeted me as he always does, putting his hand to his cheek and smiling, a reminder of the first night I had dinner there with Victoria, and she walloped me when I let her know how deeply the Basilisk had dug into her private life. Like Leitz, Victoria has an explosive temper. After the second wallop—that same night—I’d learned to see hers coming and get out of the way.

Trastevere was her favorite restaurant, and she was one of Giancarlo’s best customers. Her absence had to be putting a dent in his profits, although he never appears to be hurting for business, probably because he’s a genial host, his food is among the best in town, and the clientele in the East Eighties can afford his prices, which I politely describe as astronomical. I’d gone back there a few times after she left, hoping to bump into her casually, but she was much too smart not to anticipate my amateurish efforts. I continued to show up once or twice a week because it was a pleasantly melancholy place for a good meal. She probably held that against me, exiling her from her favorite place to eat.

Tonight, the room was busy, as usual, but my regular barstool was free, and I headed that way after handing over my jacket.

“Signore Turbo, you know you are always welcome at a table,” Giancarlo said.

I thanked him, but went to the bar all the same. It feels less like you’re eating alone when you have the bartender to exchange small talk with.

I ordered a martini with Russian vodka and Giancarlo came over to tell me the specials. It occurred to me I’ve never looked at his regular menu. He was pushing a wild boar stew, which I ordered with a grilled octopus salad to start. He recommended a glass of a Barbera he’d just got in. I said that would be fine. The first night, he and Victoria conspired to stick me with a $475 bottle of Barolo, but since then, he and I have reached a more reasonable understanding about wine. The octopus was delicious, the stew even more so. The wine was good, not in a league with the Barolo, but neither, I assumed, was the price. I enjoyed my meal while I replayed the events of West Forty-eighth Street.

Leitz was right to be concerned. Someone was after his secrets. They’d tried the brute-force electronic attack; when that didn’t work they’d resorted to an old-fashioned approach, just as I’d done. These were sophisticated, high-tech crooks—but crooks first. Early November, Timid had told me, he’d been approached. He hadn’t wanted to describe the men who’d threatened, then bribed, him to install the first computer bug. He was deliberately vague on height, hair color, girth, dress, accent. His friend, Bold, professed not to have seen them. I wondered where they’d learned the tricks of their trade, and secured the descriptions with another two hundred dollars.

One was an ordinary-looking man, medium height, brown hair, plain features—anglo, of course—wearing a puffy, dark blue jacket over khaki pants and running shoes. He did all the talking—he described the trading room layout and told Timid exactly where to place the device. That suggested an inside connection—Leitz had more problems than he knew. The other man scared both of them. Also anglo, very tall, ugly, mean. He didn’t say a word, but they could tell. Buckteeth, fading hair, pockmarked skin, and a look that conveyed how he’d happily eat their entrails while he raped their wives and daughters. Timid had been quick to agree to their proposition.

As I rethought it now, however, over stew and red wine, I realized I’d sized it up wrong, too quick to jump to conclusions. Ninety minutes earlier, back on West Forty-eighth Street, they had confirmed my belief about carrots over sticks. I knew better than that. Timid and Bold were double-dipping—take my money, sell out the first guys, then extract another fee from the first guys by selling me out as well, ratting how I was interested in the same setup. The price of the Repin had gone up. Time to watch my back.

The restaurant crowd had thinned when I finished my dinner. The city may never sleep, but Upper East Siders who can afford Trastevere have Wall Street battles to fight in the morning. Giancarlo came over to chat. He asked, as always, if I’d heard anything from Victoria. I shook my head.

“Don’t worry, my friend, she’ll be back.”

“I keep hoping you’re right.”

“Only a matter of time. You’ll see. What you and she had—no woman can stay away from that.”

“It was that obvious?”

“Signore, I’m Italian. And I am not blind.”

He filled my glass. “On me.” He went to help some departing diners with their coats.

I sipped my wine and thought about what he had said and whether what we had was indeed stronger than her need, as she put it, not to have her heart broken. A restaurateur as successful as Giancarlo learned to be a shrewd judge of character. Better than I was, I hoped. Of course, he didn’t know I’d all but driven her out the door.

She had lots of reasons, she kept saying, for not getting too close. I focused too much on all the reasons I was giving her. In retrospect, maybe she was sending a signal that had more to do with her than me. Maybe it wasn’t my doing after all, her abrupt departure. I thought again, for the hundredth time, whether if given the chance, I could change my ways.

What goddamned difference did it make? I was still dining alone.

I paid the bill, wincing slightly. Barolo or Barbera, Giancarlo didn’t serve up any bargains. Victoria was extracting revenge on the wallet as well as the heart.

Outside the temperature had dropped into the twenties. The wind had a sharp edge. I decided to walk a few blocks anyway, work off the stew. Traffic on Second Avenue was sporadic, the sidewalks mostly empty.

I made it to the mid-Seventies and was thinking about hailing a cab when a tall man in a long overcoat fell into step next to me. At least six foot seven, with thinning hair and a sharp, pockmarked face, pulled forward by a long nose and buckteeth. I couldn’t judge his age. His collar was turned up around his neck.

The man the cleaners had described. He oozed creep. Nosferatu, I thought, the impossibly tall vampire played by Max Schreck in the German silent movie from the 1920s. I looked for a coffin under his arm. It wasn’t there, but that could have been the lights playing tricks. Vampires can do those sorts of things. There were now two men in lockstep twenty feet head ahead. A glance back saw two more, the same distance behind.

Nosferatu said, “Keep walking, zek.”

How the hell could he know that? He spoke Russian with a Belarusian accent. I answered in flat American English.

“Sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Bullshit. You understand fine. Keep walking.”

“Is there some kind of problem?”

“For you.”

I kept walking. So much for watching my back. But if they wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. The zek reference bore into my brain.

“I’m going to explain the situation,” Nosferatu said in Russian.

“You’ll have to speak English,” I said in English.

“Shut the fuck up and listen.” He stayed with Russian. “I know who you are. I know who you used to be. I know everything. You know nothing, not about me, not about anything. That is the way it’s going to remain. Do you understand?”

No point in answering that.

“I said, do you understand?”

“I understand I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, still in English.

“You will learn the spirit of cooperation. Sooner than you think. What were you doing on West Forty-eighth Street? Remember what I said and think very carefully before you answer.”

There were a handful of replies, none of which was going to satisfy him. I thought carefully, as instructed. The key question was whether he’d seen me pass the computer bug to Timid.

“Trying to find a way in,” I said.

He grunted. Sometimes honesty is the best policy.

“Who for?”

“Myself. Who’s your boss?”

“None of your fucking business. That’s my point. None of this is your fucking business.”

“We’re all interested in the same thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know? You’d better ask your boss.”

The right hand came around so fast I had no chance. It hit me square in the stomach with the force of a hydraulic hammer. Boar stew and red wine erupted into my mouth as I doubled over, gasping for air. I stayed that way for a minute, collecting my breath and my wits. He didn’t look like he should have that kind of strength.

I glanced up and around. Nobody on the street, except the four men front and back who had closed in, ready to assist. Nosferatu grabbed the back of my collar and pulled me upright.

“Keep moving.”

Easier said than done, but I spat sour stew and tried to put one foot in front of the other.

“Who are you working for?” he asked.

“My own job,” I coughed.

“What do you want, once you get in?”

“Information, what else?”

He hit me again. Same force, same place. This time, stew spewed onto the sidewalk as I went to my knees.

Kneeling, retching, I sensed a few onlookers starting to gather. I took hope in that. Nosferatu jerked me up again and pushed me forward. The other guys moved too, staying in formation, but closer now. The onlookers remained where they were.

“One more chance, zek. What kind of information?”

I had the dim idea that I was better off if he thought I was hired to find him than if I was trying to compete with him.

“Whatever you left behind.”

He considered that for a moment before he slugged me once more. This time, stew splattered a parked car before I fell to my knees and vomited more stew onto the sidewalk. His strength was superhuman. I couldn’t take much more of this. No one could.

The other four guys moved in close. They were looking around. More onlookers stopped to see what was happening.

Nosferatu was impervious. He pulled me upright. His eyes bored into mine. “If you have one ounce of intelligence, and your Cheka file indicates you used to, you will stay the fuck away from things that are none of your fucking business.” Two steel fingers stabbed my chest, punctuating each word with enough force to crack ribs. “That way, you might live out the week. I will tell you one more thing—if you see me again, it will be the last time.”

My back exploded in pain as one of his cohorts hit me in the kidney. Nosferatu’s fist came around once more—into the right side of my face. The left side bounced off the cold concrete of the sidewalk.

I didn’t try to get up.

A good Samaritan rolled me over and offered to call an ambulance. I told him I was fine. He looked dubious. He was surely right. I didn’t want the help he was going to call. I made it to my knees without retching. Nosferatu and his friends were nowhere to be seen.

“Fight over a girlfriend,” I murmured. The Samaritan still looked dubious. I took his hand and he pulled me to my feet. Everything spun. I was surrounded by five or six people, all wanting to help, none quite sure how.

“I’m okay,” I croaked. “I’ll be fine.” None of them believed me.

“I called nine-one-one,” another Samaritan shouted, holding up his cell phone. “Ambulance on the way.”

I took a step toward the curb, scanning the street for a cab, before my knees buckled.

The first Samaritan held me up. “Easy,” he said. “Help’s coming.”

“Thanks.” I was still scanning the street. “Let me lean on this car.”

He released his grip and I stumbled against a parked SUV. A free cab sped down the avenue, three lanes over. I took a breath and stepped halfway into the street, hand raised as high as I could. Every muscle screamed. The cab hit the breaks, cut across traffic and screeched to a stop a foot away. I might have been safer with Nosferatu. I should have thanked the Samaritans, but I was bound for freedom. I yanked the door open, causing more muscle protest, fell into the backseat, and croaked, “Downtown.”

I all but passed out as the driver pressed the pedal to the floor.

I pulled myself upright around Thirty-fourth Street, causing shooting pains in my chest, back and head. I told the driver to drop me at Pine and Water. His look in the rearview mirror was more dubious than the ones from the Samaritans. He wore a turban and the name on the license was Indian. He said, “Excuse me, sir, not my business, but you want hospital, maybe?”

“Pine and Water,” I repeated.

“But, sir, you look…”

“Pine and Water!”

“Yes, sir.”

He still didn’t appear happy when we got there, but he took the twenty I pushed through the divider, let me get out, which I managed without falling, and sped away at the one speed he seemed familiar with. I nodded feebly to the night guard in the lobby, who’s used to comings and goings at all hours in all conditions, and took the elevator up to the office.

Foos and I rent the twenty-eighth floor of a boring tower with stunning views. We have a reception area nobody uses—it was left by the previous tenants—that has chairs and a sofa. I stretched out on the latter for a rest. I might have passed out, I’m not sure. When I felt up to moving again, I stumbled down one of the Basilisk’s twelve server corridors, which took time because they’re all forty feet long, and I had to stop once or twice, leaning against a floor-to-ceiling wall of electronic brainpower, to rest. I finally emerged into the large open area in the back. The lights were off except in a few outer offices. The smell of marijuana floated in the air. Pig Pen heard me and squawked, “Russky! Tiramisu?”

We’ve had this conversation before. Foos’s African gray parrot used to be obsessed with pizza. But he bonded with one of his master’s Ralph Lauren model girlfriends, two iterations ago. Veronica was her name. She ordered tiramisu every time Foos took her to dinner, ate two bites and brought the rest to Pig Pen in a parrot bag. When Foos moved on to the next girl, as he inevitably does, Pig Pen went into a funk. He’s still not completely over her—or the tiramisu.

“No luck, Pig Pen,” I told him the first time he asked. “Do I look Italian?”

“Russky,” he agreed.

“Do I look like Veronica?”

“No cutie. Russky.”

“That’s right. So what makes you think I have tiramisu?”

He considered that. “Cross Bronx. Accident cleared.”

Resorting to the traffic reports, which he listens to constantly on 1010 WINS, is his concession whenever logic overwhelms desire. That hasn’t stopped him from continuing to try on subsequent occasions, however.

Tonight, he took a closer look at me, and said, “Ouch.”

“You got that right. Boss here?”

“Boss man!” Pig Pen squawked at full volume, which is a lot louder than seems possible. “Russky help!”

Foos emerged from his office. “Jesus, who ran you over?”

“Leitz’s fault,” I said, stretching out on a sofa. The open area is divided into two seating arrangements—one organized like a living room, the other a big conference table with a dozen chairs. Around the perimeter are a dozen glassed-in offices and conference rooms.

“Hang on,” he said. He went to the kitchen and returned with rubbing alcohol, disinfectant, and a bag of ice. “Can you do this, or you want me to?” he asked.

“I can manage. Take a look at my back, though.” I could just shrug off my jacket and lift my turtleneck.

He whistled. “That’s gonna be a pepperoni and eggplant pizza in a couple of hours. You sure you don’t want the hospital?”

“I’m sure. Better have more ice, though.”

He went back to the kitchen. I closed my eyes and used alcohol and disinfectant on my face where Nosferatu and the sidewalk had broken the skin. My gut was uncut, but turning its own shades of pizza color. Foos returned with more ice and the vodka bottle.

“Drink?”

“What do you think?”

He poured two glasses as I tried to arrange ice bags. Pig Pen was holding on to the cage wire across his office door, watching with evident concern. His radio played in the background, forgotten for the moment. But I think they were on sports, in which he has no interest.

The vodka burned going down but felt therapeutic. I held out my glass for more. Foos poured, but said, “Better take it easy. I’m guessing your head’s as rattled as the rest of you.”

He had a point. I took another small sip, put down the glass, and shifted a couple of the ice bags.

“So what happened?”

I told him about West Forty-eighth Street, the cleaners, and Nosferatu and his friends. He listened without interruption, then said, “And you got no idea who this guy is?”

“None. But he’s got Basilisk-like information about me. That says he knew my name, who I am.”

“If the first bug’s his, he’s had access to my e-mail exchanges with Leitz. You okay for the moment?”

“I can manage.”

He went to his office and I could hear him banging on his keyboard. I think I dozed again until he came back.

“Your bug’s working like a charm. We’ve got access to Leitz’s entire network, including servers and data storage. I can see the other bug, but I had to look hard to find it. Whoever it belongs to has sophisticated technology. I can also see some other weird shit, which I’ll check out as soon as I call Leitz.”

“Hold on.” I pulled myself upright, which got everything that had calmed down angry again. “We’re dealing with shrewd customers. Leitz has a big temper. You tell him he’s been invaded not once, but twice, by persons unknown, he’s likely to go ape and do something stupid, like yank out both bugs. Better we’re there when he learns the bad news. Set up a meeting for tomorrow morning.”

“He’s not going to like it.”

“A few hours’ delay? The bad guys’ bug’s been there for weeks. They already know everything they want to know. My bug isn’t harming anyone, except maybe me.”

“You gonna be able to make it uptown in the morning?”

“I made it downtown tonight.”

“That was more luck than skill. You’re gonna be hurtin’ tomorrow.”

“Tell Leitz we’ll meet him first thing at his office. That way I only have to make it to Midtown.” I hoped Nosferatu didn’t have a 24-7 watch on the place. But if he did, he was watching East Sixty-second Street too. He could have had someone follow me yesterday. Regardless, we were going to meet again sooner or later, despite his admonition.

“You look like hell, but I think you’re feeling better,” Foos said.

“Does that mean I can use the Basilisk?”

“Patience.”

“I can blame both you and Leitz for the way I look. I’m not sure getting pummeled by a guy who takes obvious pride in his work is on the AMA-recommended heartache recovery program.”

“What are we going to tell Leitz?”

“Deliver the Repin. My job was to show how to get access to his computers. Not my fault someone else got there first.”

“If I know you, you’re not leaving it there. Not after the beating you took. You could’ve told the vampire look-alike the truth about what you were doing and walked away.”

As usual, he was right. I wasn’t leaving it there. But, equally, I wasn’t certain how far I wanted to take it. I’d completed the job, and Leitz’s hedge fund and TV bid were his problems. That said, Nosferatu tugged as hard as he punched. I didn’t like being beat up in my adopted town. I liked less the idea that it could be done with impunity. I liked less still the idea there was someone out there with ready access to what should be either classified or well-buried information about my past.

“What’s Leitz going to want to do?” I asked.

“His first impulse will be to protect his data.”

“He’s behind the curve.”

“Yeah. But he’s gonna be plenty pissed, so you’re applying logic to an irrational situation.”

“So?”

“Once he calms down, I think we can convince him to chase the fox, if that’s what we want to do, and we send the fox in an unexpected direction.”

“Maybe, except I think this fox is a bear.”

CHAPTER 6

I took the subway, which was a mistake. The rush hour train was fish-can jammed. Every jostle and bump felt as though Nosferatu had hit me again.

Force of habit, I suppose. The Moscow Metro is the only transport I use when I’m there. It’s efficient (not a ubiquitous Russian trait), and the stations contain better art than most museums. I used public transportation wherever I was stationed with the Cheka—New York, San Francisco, Washington, London—because it was one way to connect with the local populace. I’ve always tried to fit in, a legacy from the camps where one lived among multiple factions who didn’t always get along. I was a kid without formal allegiance—getting along was one way to make it through the day. I happen to like cars—I own two—but they do cut you off from your surroundings. They also provide cushioned seats and a steel wall of protection—more to the point this morning.

I’d awoken aching all over. Shots of pain stabbed my back and chest when I moved. I get up at six, a lifelong habit, and I have an exercise regimen I follow most mornings—either a five-mile run or three miles followed by a half hour of weights at the gym. I spent my childhood deprived of just about everything, food included, and I eat more than my share now to make up for lost time. I stay in shape on the theory that the average life expectancy of a Russian male is only sixty-five years at last count, and my upbringing already took its toll on mine. Pain trumped theory this morning.

My torso was painted purple and blue. My face was red, blood clotting along crisscrossing scratches on one side, black-and-blue bruises on the other, a shiner around the right eye. The colors extended well above the hairline I didn’t have. Overall, it wasn’t as bad as the beating Lachko’s thug had given me six months earlier, but I didn’t want to run into Nosferatu again anytime soon. Unless I was carrying a shotgun.

I made breakfast with extra coffee and logged on to Ibansk.com, the creation of a man known only as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, a muckraking impresario with a fondness for breathless hyperbole, who produces the most widely read blog in Russia. His supercharged collection of fact, insider rumor, speculation and high-heat opinion (his) gives readers—denizens, in his parlance—a seat at everything from top-secret Kremlin conferences to oligarch’s private rooms at the latest, hottest Moscow (or London or Paris or New York) nightclubs, as well as more intimate settings. He’s fun to follow and, more to the point, accurate in his barbs. I know because I know the list of people who’d like to see him executed. It starts at the top of the Kremlin and includes many of the men I used to work with.

I’d been keeping a close eye on Ivanov because I’d been a firsthand witness in December to what bore all the signs of the outbreak of Ibanskian gang warfare. After dinner with Sasha, I’d left him at the Pushkin Square metro station and decided to walk the mile or so down Tverskaya, one of the city’s oldest thoroughfares, known as Gorky Street in Soviet Times, to my hotel. I stay at the Metropole, a marvelous old place halfway between the Kremlin and Lubyanka, where many of the original Bolsheviks lived in the early days of the revolution. A mosaic on the façade still calls on the proletariat of the world to unite. The restaurant may be the most opulent room in Moscow. The ironies of Russian history captured in a single building.

A clear evening, not too cold. I was enjoying the winter air as I came up on one of the many restaurants/nightclubs/casinos that cater to the desires of the newly rich by giving them flashy, overpriced venues to show off their leggy girlfriends while trying to spend more on Champagne and caviar than the oligarch at the next table. A phalanx of Mercedes roared down the wide avenue and pulled into the Ibanskian equivalent of the VIP parking lot—the sidewalk in front of the club. Not the easiest thing because the sidewalk was already crowded with a dozen other Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, and Range Rovers. Several bodyguards, not bothering to hide their weapons, emerged from the new arrivals. Some rules are just common sense—never try to break up a dog fight, never walk voluntarily into a group of drawn weapons. I waited for a break in the traffic to cross to the far sidewalk.

About the time I got there, two more Mercedes roared up Tverskaya from the opposite direction, traveling too fast, not uncommon in Moscow, but something about them flashed trouble. I ducked behind a parked Lada as they screeched to a stop. Four men leapt out, fire spurting from the muzzles of their machine guns.

The bodyguards were slow. Three fell in the first barrage. Others got their guns up, and a firefight was on. I heard more than I saw as I knelt behind the parked car, hoping thin Russian steel was up to the task of stopping lead Russian bullets. The RATTA-TAT-TATTA-TAT-TATTA of gunfire filled the night. Slugs ricocheted off stone. The street shook as a car exploded. Flaming metal flew overhead and bounced off the building behind. Cars skidded and crashed. The gunfire ebbed, then resumed in intensity. When it finally stopped, as suddenly as it had started, I didn’t move for a minute before peeking through the Lada’s blown-out windows.

Carnage everywhere. A dozen cars sprawled across the avenue at all angles, riddled with bullet holes. Few had window glass left. The bodies of three drivers lay collapsed over their steering wheels. A lone horn blared under the weight of one, a heavyset woman in a blue coat. She could no longer hear it. She was missing the back of her head. On the far sidewalk, where I’d been walking a few minutes before, fallen fighters sprawled across pockmarked metal and concrete. I counted six, there were probably more. The exploded car burned full bore. The first police sirens whined in the distance.

In the center of the slaughter sat one Mercedes, fatter and heavier than the rest, the paint peppered but the glass intact. Armored. As I came around, the back door opened. A dark-haired young woman in a backless dress emerged from the car, as if stepping out. Except she wasn’t stepping. She wasn’t moving. She was supported by the man behind her. Three ugly red holes perforated her pretty skin. Her torso straightened for a moment before he let her drop on the pavement. She’d been attractive in life—fine skin, good figure—but the heavy makeup she’d applied for her evening out now functioned as a death mask, freezing her last instant of fear and pain. It also froze her age, which couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

The man who dropped the corpse climbed out after her. He was tall, in his fifties. He wore a suit and was the only person or thing unmarked by the attack. They must have just been exiting the car when it started. She’d been first and taken the bullets meant for him.

The man looked straight at me as I approached. He blinked once, and I had the sense of a mental photograph being recorded.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said, the voice calm, annoyed and full of authority, as if I were trespassing on his property.

“A passerby. I saw…”

“What did you see?”

I pointed around. “Hard to miss.”

“Forget all about it,” he said. “Walk away and forget it.”

“But there may be wounded…”

“Everyone will be taken care of. I will make sure of that. Go now.”

The next question was a mistake, but curiosity is a lifelong affliction.

“Who are you?”

He blinked again, another photo taken, before reaching inside his jacket. I thought he was going for a gun. Instead he came out with a wallet and held out a wad of ruble notes.

“Beat it.”

“I don’t need money.”

I left him there and picked my way through the wreckage still looking for anyone who needed help. I found only corpses. The body count pushed a dozen.

The sirens grew louder. Another rule—don’t get involved with Russian police unless you’re still an active Chekist. I hustled down Tverskaya, passing a posse of police cars headed to the scene. At the bottom of the street, the cops sealed off the street at Manege Square. No one stopped me, no one tried to ask questions. As horrific as the massacre had been, it was far from a rarity in the New Russia—Ivanov’s Ibansk. It would be dealt with accordingly.

I walked the last block to the Metropole and went up to my room, where I logged on to Ibansk.com. Not half an hour had passed since the shooting. The sirens still whined. Ivanov was on the case. And he had the name of the target of the attack, the one man left standing, the man I had spoken to.

Efim Konychev.

It appeared I’d witnessed an opening salvo in a battle over the future of the Baltic Enterprise Commission, a shadowy network of Web-hosting servers across the old Soviet Bloc, the go-to resource for anyone looking for a safe place on the Net from which to spam, scam, phish, hack, steal, or purvey porn, especially porn featuring kids.

Konychev was a favorite subject for the chronicler of Ibansk, probably because he was as good a personification as one could find of the unbridled capitalism, Kremlin control, and often crooked undertakings that define the New Russia. I’d been following the news via Ivanov’s posts since returning to New York, which mostly dealt with growing clashes within the BEC and the unknown whereabouts of its boss. According to the latest post, earlier today:

Foos called just as I was finishing breakfast.

“That weird shit on Leitz’s network I saw last night? I spent some more time looking around after you went home. He’s got someone inside working something outside. Guy, maybe gal, goes out through a couple of zombies, accesses data, brings it back, but only to his hard drive, doesn’t touch the servers, and he covers the route pretty well—though not quite well enough.”

Zombies are sleeping computers left online that cyber-crooks borrow when they don’t want to leave a trail, usually for spamming or denial of service attacks, but no reason they can’t obscure other trails.

“This connected or unconnected to Nosferatu’s bug?”

“Unconnected, it appears. Only happens a few times. Three in August. Then again in November. Then December thirtieth. That’s it.”

“How much should we tell Leitz?”

“He’s your client,” he said and hung up. That’s Foos.

If Nosferatu had anyone watching 140 West Forty-eighth Street, I wasn’t going to spot him or her in the morning crowd that filled the block, so I walked straight to the door of Leitz’s building, head down. The lobby guard asked my destination, checked my New York driver’s license, grimaced at my battered face and dispatched me to the forty-second floor. A pretty twenty-something receptionist sent me up a staircase to conference room A. She didn’t do any better job of disguising her unease.

The conference room overlooked the trading floor, which at a few minutes after nine, appeared fully staffed by some forty men and women with an average age of thirty-two, all in various stages of undress. Midwinter, but they were all wearing T-shirts, tank tops, capri pants, some in gym shorts. A few wore shoes. The Gillette company wasn’t making much money on razor blades. Paper plates holding the remains of breakfast, more fruit and bran than bacon and eggs, littered the desks. The heat was on high. I took off my jacket as the door opened behind me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Leitz’s voice boomed from behind. “Everybody does. Fact is, there’s more pure brain power on that floor than eight Manhattan projects combined.”

“Brain or bran?”

He laughed his big laugh. “Both. I hire brains not suits. I feed ’em, I don’t care what they eat. Coffee?”

“Black.”

I turned as he went to the sideboard to pour. He was dressed in the same cashmere sweater, corduroys, and handmade shoes as the other day. Foos leaned against the door jam, grinning. He’d got there early to soften up his friend, I hoped.

Leitz handed me a mug. “Foos said you took some heat at my expense. I see he wasn’t exaggerating. I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting anything like that.”

I shrugged. “Neither of us were.”

“I’m sorry, in any event. Foos also says you have news.”

Foos and I had discussed how to break this news last night, before I stumbled the two blocks home to my apartment. We agreed the direct approach was best—or least worst. I was still prepared to go with the plan but, remembering the warnings about the temper, I took my coffee to a chair on the far side of the table.

I said, “I bugged your computers last night. We’ve had access to your entire network for the last twelve hours.”

The big face turned red. “Not possible.”

“Not only possible, but easy.”

Two big hands balled themselves into fists the size of cantaloupes. Eruption was a spark away.

“NO! You’ve only had… I don’t believe it!”

I tossed some pages across the table. “Here are e-mails you sent this morning. Behind those are the spreadsheets one of your branny brains was working on at seven fifteen. You’ve got some interesting trading positions too. I printed it all for easy reference.”

“He’s telling it straight,” Foos said.

Leitz glanced at the papers just long enough to see they were what I said. He threw them aside, and the fists pounded the table, which was granite and had to weigh several hundred pounds. It shifted on its stand. He turned to Foos.

“GODDAMMIT! You told me…”

“I told you the perimeter was secure and it is,” Foos said. “You weren’t hacked.”

“Then… WHAT?” Leitz swung his glare back to me. The jowls shook, the eyes fired. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the half-clothed mathematical geniuses reporting a losing trade to this boss. Something about the needlessness of the rage made me want to rub it in, but that also could have been getting beat up, not to mention my overall frame of mind.

“Pedestrian. I bribed a member of your cleaning crew. He put a wireless recording device on a box on your trading floor. That gave us access to everything.”

“Cleaning crew?”

“Simplest way in. I could have used a half-dozen others.” Leitz’s fists rose again but stopped in midair. He stood and went to the phone on the sideboard. Foos was looking unusually uncomfortable.

“Don’t,” I said.

“DON’T WHAT?”

“Don’t call whomever you’re calling to tell them to fire the cleaning crew. The next one will be just as easy to penetrate. All it took was a thousand dollars—and I probably overpaid since it was your money.”

The phone flew straight at my head until the cord jerked it back and it clattered onto the tabletop. That didn’t stop me from ducking.

“Leitz! Chill!” Foos said.

Leitz looked at the phone, then at his empty hand. He shook his big head.

“Sorry.”

So far the direct approach was working like a charm. I looked around to see what else he could throw. Foos read my mind.

“Sebastian, sit down. We’re on your side. There’s more.”

Leitz took his seat. He appeared deflated, almost like a punctured balloon. He’d been broken into, and as anyone would, he felt violated.

“What more?” he said.

Nosferatu’s blows ached. I thought about whether I needed this. I looked across at Foos. His face was impassive. But he was out of the line of fire.

“Someone else planted a bug just like mine—eight weeks ago.”

The red face turned purple. The outsized cheeks blew out like Dizzy Gillespie’s chops, except there was no joy in this visage. The fists disappeared beneath the tabletop. I planted my feet on the carpet.

Leitz started to stand. Muscles stressed beneath the sweater as the tabletop rose. Coffee cups, coffee, pads and pencils, staplers and paper clips slid in my direction. I pushed the wheels of my chair back to the glass wall before three hundred pounds of granite slab flipped in slow motion, teetered at the top of the arc, and landed at my feet with a thump. It missed my knees by inches.

Foos vacated the doorway as Leitz stomped out.

“I warned you about the temper,” he said.

“You also told me to go for maximum impact.”

I stood, mainly to make sure I still could. No one on the trading floor below paid the least attention to any of us.

We waited about ten minutes, giving Leitz time to cool off, before going down to his office on the floor below. Foos seemed to know his way around. I asked him if he still advocated the direct approach. He grunted in response.

The office was all glass. Two large windows looked south and east over Manhattan and on to Queens. Interior panes faced the trading floor. Leitz was at his desk, another stone table, on the phone. He hit a switch as we walked in and the inside glass turned frosty opaque. I stopped by the door, keeping my distance. He noted where I was standing and shook his head. His voice was tight and tense. He was fighting the temper and winning, for the moment.

“All right, yes, dammit, I’ll call him,” he said into the receiver. “As soon as I finish this meeting.… No, I have no idea.… Yes, I know, but… Not like this, not now.”

He put down the phone. “Sorry. Some issues with my son at his school. I owe you an apology,” he said to me. “I’ve always had a bad temper. Sometimes it gets the better of me.”

“Damned near got the better of me,” I said.

“You’re right. I have no excuse. I’m a very competitive person. I hate to lose. I hate the idea of being compromised. Especially by someone who cheats.”

“I didn’t cheat. You asked me to find a way into your system.”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I was referring to the other guy. Our agreement stands, of course. I’ll have the Repin delivered.”

“Fine. I’ve got a question about something on your trading floor.”

“What…?”

“Out here.”

Leitz and Foos followed me out the door. There was a healthy buzz of activity. After 9:30, the market was open, and the underdressed legions were going about their daily battle.

“Wait here,” I said and went back into the office.

Nosferatu, if it was Nosferatu, had used the cleaners on the computers. That said he was opportunistic, he’d employed available talent. Unlikely, then, that he’d have an expert crew work the office. That didn’t mean his bug was the only one. I went over the furniture with my hands, feeling for anything out of place. Foos and Leitz watched from the door, Foos wearing a quizzical grin, Leitz an angry frown. I was on my hands and knees under his desk, which was pissing off my bruised muscles, when I found it. An electronic doodad, the size of a raisin, tucked in the crease where the frame met the tabletop. I peeled it off the stone, stood, and placed it on top of the desk. Leitz looked ready to blow. I put a finger to my lips and pointed outside. The two big men backed away.

“Let’s go to a conference room,” I said.

I thought Leitz was going to take a swing at me, but he turned and led the way to a small room on the side of the trading floor. I held up a hand as we entered and went through the search routine again. I didn’t expect to find anything and didn’t.

“I think we’re okay here,” I said.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” Leitz exploded. “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?”

“I could ask you that,” I said. “You’ve got somebody’s attention.”

He deflated again as he fell into a chair.

“Serves me right. Arrogance… Well, let’s just say arrogance is dangerous.”

Foos and I stayed by the door.

“Let me ask you this,” Leitz said. “Foos told me about the men who beat you up, including the tall man, what do you call him?”

“Nosferatu. Silent movie character, first vampire on film.”

“I’ll have to rent it. You think he planted both bugs?”

“The tap on the computers, certainly. The one on your desk, I’m not so sure. The cleaners didn’t say anything about that. Could have been someone else, like the guy who gave them the layout of your trading floor.”

“You asked them?”

“Yes.”

“SHIT. How many goddamned problems do I have?”

“You should have your entire office swept, to state the obvious.”

“GODDAMMIT!” Leitz swung back and forth between the two of us, face red, fists balled. He was halfway out of his chair. “I knew something… I should have… SHIT!” I waited for another explosion, but it didn’t come. Instead, he froze in midrise, eyes closed tight, for thirty seconds or more.

“Options,” he said, as he lowered himself slowly back into his chair. “What are my options?”

Foos said, “I can tag a piece of data and we can follow it. But if these are sophisticated crooks, they’ll run us up and down a bunch of blind alleys.”

“Nosferatu had a Belarusian accent,” I said. “A lot of tech thieves are based in the former Soviet countries. They’re smart, tough, and well protected. Even if we tracked them down, probably not much you could do. Legally, I mean.”

“Illegally?” Leitz asked.

“I didn’t mean it that way. Not much you could do, period.”

“So I’m a powerless victim of some shady guys in Belarus? I refuse to accept that.”

Americans like to believe they are masters of their fate and the rest of the world is irrelevant. No percentage in pointing out that brand of arrogance. I was thinking about whether to broach the other anomaly in his computer network when a middle-aged woman leaned in the door. “Your sister’s on line two. Third time she’s called. Says it’s—”

“I know, urgent,” Leitz said. He punched a button on the phone. “Hello, Julia. I’m warning you, this is already a bad day. And watch your language. I have company.”

A nasal twang blew out of the speaker. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get through for an hour. Haven’t you heard? New bidder. Sixty-seven-point-five billion. Stock of both companies are up. Street’s looking for a bidding war. We need to get out a statement—right away. I sent you a draft. Check your e-mail.”

Leitz pushed another button on the phone and looked at me. “I suppose my e-mail is compromised along with everything else.”

“Afraid so.”

I thought he was going to punch the phone, but he held back. The voice from the speaker became increasingly agitated.

“Sebastian!? Are you there? What’s going on? We need to do something, dammit! The stocks are trading… Sebastian? SEBASTIAN?!”

Leitz pushed a button gently. “I’m here, Julia. I’ve got some other issues at the moment.”

“What other issues? What are you talking about? We’ve got to respond. We can’t give them the whole day. The press will—”

“I’ve called a meeting for eleven thirty, here. Bankers, lawyers, you too. We’ll review where we stand.”

“Eleven thirty? Where we stand? That’s two hours from now. We can’t wait. We can’t—”

“Eleven thirty.” Leitz’s tone cut off further argument. “I assume you can make it?”

“I… Shit. I’ve got… Dammit. There’s… Hold on.”

The phone went quiet. Leitz said to us, “My sister, who is also my PR adviser on this deal, lives life in a permanent state of high anxiety and overcommitment.” He pulled a paper from the shirt pocket under his sweater and held it out to me. “This happened just before you arrived.”

I took the paper and retreated back to a safe distance. It was a Dow Jones story, timed at 7:48 A.M.

Julia Leitz came back on the line, shattering the brief silence.

“I can do eleven thirty. I may be a few minutes late. But I still think—”

“Good. See you then,” Leitz said and disconnected. He looked at the two of us.

“I can’t operate this way.”

“They already know about your eleven-thirty meeting,” I said. “They’ll be looking to see what you do after that.”

“I’ll tag something coming out of the meeting,” Foos said. “Give them the afternoon to pick it up, we’ll see where it goes.”

“You could try spreading some misinformation,” I said. “Although my altercation last night says they’ll be on the lookout for that.”

Leitz shook his head. “Too many people involved in this thing. Let’s just get back to normal so I can function.”

I handed back the Dow Jones story. “I take it this wasn’t a knockout punch.”

He shook his head. “The margins got thinner, but no, not a knockout. Which begs the question of what they’re up to.” He looked at me. “This is the deal of a lifetime for me. I never dreamed I’d be in this position. I’m not going to go down easily, in fact, I don’t plan to go down at all.”

“I hesitate to say this, but you’ve made an assumption there’s no evidence to support.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You assume that whoever placed the bug is working for a rival bidder.”

“That seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

“Possible, maybe even probable. But, as I said, no evidence.”

“What else, then?”

“You’re looking at this from your perspective. That’s not where the bad guy’s coming from. He—or she—is doing what he’s doing for his own reasons. His perspective, hers maybe, not yours, is the one that’s relevant.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Only what I said. Be careful about assumptions.”

“IT’S AN OPPOSING BIDDER!”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to win the argument, and I didn’t really care much whether I did.

“I need your help,” Leitz said.

“I’ve done what we agreed.”

“I know. But you can find the bastards. I’ll take it from there.”

“Not that easy.”

Foos felt my ambivalence. “That wasn’t the agreement, Sebastian.”

“Find the bastards,” he said. “Just tell me who they are. Give me a name.”

“Arrogance talking,” I said.

I expected fire but I got a hard, level stare from the kidney pools.

“A good trader always knows what he can get from a deal,” Leitz said.

“A good card player knows when the price of seeing the next card is too high.”

“I’m prepared to pay for the help I’m asking. State your price.”

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because I was already in. Maybe because I knew I wasn’t going to allow Nosferatu to get away with beating me up. Maybe because a guy like Leitz gets the competitive juices flowing. I was in the game, and I wasn’t about to fold, especially when I held a couple of aces, including one up the sleeve. Maybe just because I finally was intrigued and didn’t have anything better to do for the next few days. Or maybe because I too, found myself in a position to get something I never dreamed of. I might have told Leitz those are good times to think twice, go home and sleep it over.

I put down my next bet. “One million dollars. And the Malevich.”

That caught him by surprise. The kidney pools widened. He started to shake his head.

I said, “Hear me out.”

He stopped.

“One million dollars, cash—if I’m successful. Plus, the Malevich—four months, one third of the year, on loan, in perpetuity. You own it, I get to enjoy it, part of the time. You sell it, that’s your prerogative, but I get ten percent as compensation for loss of use.”

The laugh that exploded across the room almost blew both Foos and me through the frosted glass. Foos steadied his feet and smiled.

When the laugh softened to a chuckle, Leitz said, “You’d make a good trader. You’ve got creativity—and chutzpah. But you’re trying to take advantage of having me over the proverbial barrel.”

“And when you’re about to clip some guy on the other side, you stop, revisit the Golden Rule, tell yourself that’s not the Christian thing to do, and walk away?”

He was still smiling. “Touché. But what you want is too complicated. The insurance alone…” He shook his big head. “It’ll never work.”

Mathematicians are good card players because they can calculate odds. They’re not always the best psychologists.

“That’s it then. Good luck.” I looked at Foos. “See you back downtown.”

I was out on the trading floor when Leitz called, “Wait!”

I returned to the door.

“You’d walk out on a million dollars?” he said.

“A prospective million. I have to find the guys who bugged you to earn it. That won’t be easy, as I said. But, yes, and here’s why: My last client paid me seven hundred thousand to find his daughter, who was never really missing to begin with, and now wishes he never met me. His wife was murdered, the girl’s a borderline basket case, and he’s got one foot in the slammer, although that’s not my fault. It ended badly for everybody—including me. I lost something more valuable than money. The fee wasn’t enough. I’m sorry to tell you, this has a similar feel.”

I had to hand it to him, he didn’t hesitate. I think he was almost smiling. “Okay. But, the Malevich…?”

“You didn’t listen to what I just said. I’ve already been beaten up once on your nickel. I’m going to be compensated on my terms in ways that satisfy me, however difficult and complicated. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’m sorry. One more thing, while we’re at it—if you really want my help, I go about things as I see fit. You hire me, I’m in to the finish. I talk to whomever I want. I find whomever bugged your computers, I earn my fee. What happens with your TV bid, or your other affairs—that’s your concern.”

He hesitated this time. I turned to go.

“Stop,” Leitz said.

I turned back one more time.

He said, “Tell me this. You charged the last guy seven hundred thousand. You want a million from me, plus the Malevich. What’s the difference?”

My turn to smile. “The last guy didn’t try to crush my legs under his conference table. You get a hazard premium.”

CHAPTER 7

I should have kept walking. To think I could find the guys who bugged Leitz was my own brand of hubris. To think I could find them without suffering consequences was hubris squared. Then again, to think I began to understand what I was getting into was blind stupid. We have another proverb—every fox praises his own tail.

Foos said, “You still playing him?”

“Some. This was an inside job. The data trail you found. The guy who bribed the cleaner knew the office layout, told him where to place the bug. Employee, client, family, friend, someone Leitz does business with.”

Leitz hadn’t wanted to hear any of that. I’d mostly dismissed the employee possibility on the grounds that he or she wouldn’t need the risk of involving a third party. Leitz confirmed he’d only lost two staff in the last year, neither on bad terms. Clients rarely, if ever, visited the office. Vendors were a possibility, but Nosferatu would have had to obtain a list from somewhere. I asked about the bankers and lawyers descending at 11:30.

“All trusted advisers,” he said.

“All potentially for sale. Put the trading floor and all offices off limits. Have them escorted from the elevator to the conference room and back again.”

He didn’t like that idea either, but he said he’d follow my advice.

I broached the subject of family.

“IMPOSSIBLE!” he shouted, temperature headed skyward. “Don’t even… None of my…”

“Any of them pissed off at you?”

“OF COURSE NOT!”

That answer came too fast.

“Anybody under pressure, financial, personal or otherwise?”

“NO!”

Much too fast. I shook my head. “You’re not being candid. That’s not going to help them or me.”

“Chill, man,” Foos said to his friend. “All in the Big Dick anyway.”

Leitz looked from me to him. Big Dick is Foos’s nickname for what he calls the Data Intelligence Complex, the network of computers and databases—government and private—that store just about everything we do that involves anything electronic, from our purchases and paydays to our dental records and divorces. It is all there—death and taxes too.

Leitz looked back and forth between us again.

“We are a normal family,” he said, spacing every word. “We’ve had… adversities, like any other family, but we’ve overcome them. Nobody would…”

He left the sentence hanging and just shook his head at the impossibility of familial duplicity. Even geniuses have a hard time facing the prospect of betrayal.

“Sometimes, people don’t have any choice,” I said. “They’re forced to do things they don’t want to. Anybody have legal troubles, marital problems, need money?”

“NO!”

“I assume they’ve all been here, to the office, at one time or another?”

“Of course. I mean, I guess so. Why not? Why is this relevant?”

I let it go. Better to have this conversation later, when I had some idea of who might have set him up.

Back downtown, Foos, the Basilisk, and I went to work. Named by its creator after the mythological beast that was supposed to be the most poisonous on the planet, this Basilisk is hardwired into the Big Dick and is for sure the most poisonously invasive data-mining system in captivity. Fortunately, Foos doesn’t let many people use it. I grew up in a society that had no privacy. The state—more accurately the Communist Party—had the self-proclaimed right to find out anything it wanted to about anyone it chose, by any means it felt necessary. For twenty years as an officer of the KGB, I served as an instrument of state and party, although most of my time was spent spying on foreigners. Other people looked after the locals. I left Russia after communism collapsed under the weight of its own corruption and incompetence, and I moved to New York in part to live in a place where individual privacy is respected.

Wrong.

I soon found out how easy it is to acquire all kinds of information—phone calls, purchases, financial records, criminal records, mortgage, tax and car payments, salaries, employment histories, almost everything except maybe how someone voted in the last election—just by asking and paying a fee. Companies like ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, and Seisint maintain voluminous files, fifty billion of them, on virtually every one of us, in the name of more effective marketing and occasionally combating crime or terrorism. Foos was one of the czars of the Big Dick for several years, with a company that employed an earlier generation of the Basilisk, until he realized he was propagating evil. He sold his firm, endowed STOP with half the proceeds, and designed the current Basilisk to be more powerful than anything that came before. He now fights a guerilla war against the entire Data Intelligence Complex, which has resulted in several TV and newspaper exposés, Congressional hearings and a couple of laws that strengthened consumers’ rights and infuriated his former clients. He laughs out loud whenever he’s reminded of how mad he makes them.

A few years ago, when things were slow and I needed to get away for a while, we made a wager—lunch at Peter Luger in Brooklyn where they grill steaks big enough to feed a Russian village. I bet I could leave town with two days’ headstart, and the Basilisk couldn’t find me. He laughed and said he’d be ordering a porterhouse. In the end, we both won.

I got a lockbox for the trunk of my car, filled it with cash and took off without saying good-bye on the twenty-seventh of September, figuring whatever head start I could get on the Basilisk was worth it. I drove upstate, then west into Pennsylvania and Ohio, sticking to back roads. Highways have tollbooths. Tollbooths have cameras. Those cameras are connected to databases. It’s still primitive, but the Basilisk has photo-recognition capability.

I made leisurely progress westward, following Horace Greeley’s advice, even if I was no longer young, staying at out-of-the-way motels and eating at diners and mom-and-pop restaurants where nobody takes much interest in who’s passing through—unless they stay. I’d done four tours of duty in the States with the KGB, two in New York and one each in Washington and San Francisco. I’d rarely left the coasts during any of them, and when I did, it was to travel to another big city—Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas. This was the first time I got to know the rest of the country—the varied landscape, the orderly towns, the warm and welcoming people. For years I’d heard about “Main Street”—now, I saw it firsthand. When I got west of the Rockies, I bought some camping equipment and spent two months in the national parks of Utah and Arizona. You can really get lost there, if you stay away from the tourists. The landscape is vast, awe inspiring, and inhospitable. Siberia with sun.

In December it got cold and I was feeling the need for less motion and more human contact, so I decided to test my fate in a city. I drove into L.A. a week before Christmas, found a motel room I could rent by the week for cash, and got a job washing dishes in a restaurant where they didn’t ask about Social Security numbers. I made friends with the Mexicans who worked there—most of them illegal—and we hung out together, drinking beer and playing cards when we weren’t working. They sensed I had something to hide, same as they did, and we all respected each other’s space. I still keep in touch with several of them, and I’ve got standing invitations to visit just about every major city south of the border.

February—time to move on. I drove to Texas, down to Donald Judd’s lonesome, soulful installation in Marfa, which felt a little like the Vorkuta camps without inmates or snow. There’s even one artist’s idea of a Soviet era schoolroom left empty for time and decay to take its toll. Back up north to Dallas and Houston, east into Louisiana and up to Memphis, again taking my time. Sitting by the Mississippi on April Fool’s Day, I decided I’d had enough. I’d made it six months. I found a pay phone and left a message for Foos, “Game over.” I turned on my cell phone for the first time since leaving New York, and it rang a few minutes later. Foos said, “Good thing you got out of L.A. when you did. I have three pictures of your car on the Santa Monica Freeway and two on Wilshire Boulevard. The Basilisk came within two days of having you dragged down to Room 101.” That’s the existential hell on earth George Orwell cooked up—it holds each person’s greatest fear. Funny guy, that Foos.

This is how I knew the beast could find Victoria in a New York minute if I was only allowed to set it loose. No dice, Foos said for the umpteenth time. Stick to business.

With Suprematist Composition as an incentive, that’s what I did. I started with Pauline Leitz, missus number one. My questions had received polite nonresponses from her ex-husband. She was a “good woman” and a “good mother” whom Leitz had meet while he was in graduate school. She “hadn’t liked New York” and moved back to Minnesota after the divorce. I inferred, perhaps unkindly, that Leitz had married his grad school sweetheart, thought better of it after meeting Jenny, and paid well for her to go quietly with a lot of sincere reassurances that this was best for their son. I wondered if she knew about the lifestyle she’d missed out on—or cared if she did.

It didn’t take the Basilisk long to fill out a profile. Forty-four years old, living in Minnetonka, Minnesota, an associate professor of English at Hamline College. She’d published two books on Victorian literature, both out of print. She hadn’t remarried and had reclaimed her maiden name—Turner. She and Leitz had been married fourteen years and divorced four years ago. Leitz was just beginning to make it big, he was still a budding billionaire. She came out with $55 million that was now close to $255 million. I wondered if he ran her money. Her house was paid up, as was her car, a two-year-old Volvo. Her credit card bills showed a normal pattern of purchasing at the usual supermarkets and department stores. She had one speeding ticket from two years earlier. Hard to tell from her driver’s license photo whether she was blond or red haired, attractive or plain. She vacationed at spas like Canyon Ranch and ski resorts like Vail. Three trips to New York in the last five years, staying at the Regency, a block from Leitz’s house. Other than that, I guessed her son came to her.

Jenny Leitz, née Jennifer Chao, ABC (American-born Chinese), also from Queens, was thirty-five, ten years younger than Leitz, for whom she’d gone to work after getting her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT. Not clear when they became an item, but she’d married him a little less than three years ago, and they had one daughter who was eight months old. Jenny had been pulling down a multimillion dollar income at Leitz Ahead, but she’d quit work after the birth of their child to lead the life of a quintessential housewife and new mother, at least according to her credit cards. Her spending patterns were normal in all respects, but in the last few months, they showed a concentration in shops and restaurants in the far East Sixties. She hadn’t taken a job. Perhaps she was volunteering—plenty of hospitals and related organizations in that part of town.

Foos programmed the Basilisk to flag anomalies. A person without a gun license who suddenly purchases several boxes of ammunition. Someone, otherwise healthy, who starts charging large quantities of cold remedies. Most times, such breaks from normal patterns indicate a stolen identity. But not always. Two months earlier, four new phone numbers showed up in Jenny Leitz’s records. She’d been calling them, and they her, several times a week. Three belonged to doctors specializing in neurological diseases. The fourth was a medical imaging lab. All were located in the East Sixties and Seventies, the neighborhood around New York Hospital.

Unsure what to conclude from that, except that all might not be well with Jenny Leitz, I turned to her husband’s siblings.

First up, Marianna, number two after Sebastian in the family line. Plenty of anomalies here. For the last few months, Marianna and her husband appeared to be living separate lives—she at their home in Bedford, with their two kids, a boy and a girl aged fourteen and eleven, he at their apartment on Park Avenue. Jonathan Stern was the CEO of Kallon Corp., a medical device maker. He traveled a great deal. His hotel charges showed a fondness for nighttime Champagne from room service. His non-hotel charges included more than a few lingerie stores. Perhaps he was bringing Marianna a souvenir camisole from Chicago, a negligee from Pittsburgh, and a new lace bra-and-panties set from Dallas. My money was on local usage. I asked the Basilisk to line up the Champagne orders and underwear purchases. Big surprise—every date matched.

Marianna appeared to have her own problems. She was buying more booze than most Russians. Her chosen drop was brandy, Cognac (Rémy Martin) in the good days, but since her husband moved out, less expensive, some would say cheap, fare—Fundador from Spain and Presidente from Mexico. I actually like both, but I’ve been known to tipple too much cheap vodka. Their joint checking account provided an explanation. The automatic deposits from Kallon Corp.—$27,000 a month—stopped in November. The account had shrunk from $66,000 to less than $15,000 since. Marianna was feeling the pinch, in more ways than one. A trip to Bedford was in order.

Next in line was the middle sister, Julia, who’d kept the Leitz name when she’d married Walter Coryell fifteen years ago. She and her husband and two kids lived in a loft in Chelsea that had set them back $3.6 million in 2004. They’d financed 50 percent and kept current on both mortgage and monthly maintenance. Julia was a wealthy woman, a bank balance of $50,000 and upward of $8 million in savings and investments. Not in her brother’s league, but rich by everyone else’s standard. She still shopped discount—H&M and Century 21 and the occasional department store when it had a sale, not that she bought that much. Neither did her husband. She had two BlackBerries, both worked overtime. His worked hardly at all. The kids, boys, aged twelve and ten, attended New York City private schools that set the parents back seventy-five Gs a year. They both had cell phones and texted each other and their friends 24-7, including when they were in class. They had PlayStations and Xboxes and iPads, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and all the other accouterments of upper-class life in twenty-first-century America. I’m enormously fond of my adopted country, but as a former member of the CPUSSR, I often think America could benefit from good old Soviet-style centralized discipline, starting with a rule that every kid should not be permitted to have every gadget that Silicon Valley comes up with. I’ve yet to find anyone who agrees with me.

Julia Leitz owned a financial public relations firm with two partners. Her office was on Third Avenue in the Forties. Her husband had an Internet company, an amalgamator of travel options—hotels, flights, rental cars—called YouGoHere.com. It had weathered the dot-com meltdown and seemed to be holding on, if not setting cyber-tourism afire. His office was just over the East River in Queens. Nothing appeared overtly out of kilter in the Leitz-Coryell household, but looks can be deceiving.

Thomas Leitz was the baby of the family, six years younger than Julia. He was thirty-five now and worked for the New York City Department of Education, as he had since receiving his M.A. from City College where he also got his undergraduate degree. He lived alone in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in the Village. He ate out most nights and ran up modest tabs at a few saloons with names that suggested a single-sex clientele. He also had a long-running spending problem—repeated patterns of running up huge credit card debt, carrying it for a few months or more, then paying it off—all at once—canceling the cards and starting again. The Basilisk served up a dozen cycles, going back seven years. Every eight to twelve months, he maxed out two, three, four cards at their $10,000 or $15,000 limits. The damage was done at designer boutiques and the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store—$500 shirts, $1,200 trousers, $2,400 sweaters, and $4,000 jackets—and Broadway theaters. When he went to a show, which he did once or twice a week, he purchased the premium tickets the theaters began selling a few years ago—at $400 a pop. None of which he was buying on his $42,000 teacher’s salary.

Two months earlier, he was carrying $35,000. Debt service alone was running $700 a month. He didn’t appear to have any other assets to speak of, but in late November, his balances were paid off and the cards canceled. At the moment, he had new Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx cards, with an aggregate balance of $8,000. The foothills of the next debt mountain. The timing of the last payoff was too close to the bugging of Leitz’s computers to ignore. Nosferatu, if it was Nosferatu, had his choice of targets.

I went two for six on phone calls. A standard not-here-right-now message from Pauline Leitz. A harried-sounding secretary at Julia Leitz’s office, with the lady in question shrieking in the background. She had no time to talk to me. A high-pitched recording announced Thomas Leitz was “out and about, but don’t pout, leave a message, don’t be a lout.” A slurry-voiced Marianna Leitz answered her phone but had a hard time grasping who I was and why I was calling, which had more to do with the brandy sloshing around her glass than my attempt to explain. It took a few minutes, but she agreed to see me the next morning at nine thirty. Jonathan Stern’s assistant took my name and number without comment. Jenny Leitz had a high, sweet voice. She said, “Sebastian said you might call. He told me I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“I’m trying to help him, Mrs. Leitz. I told him I have to go about my job as I see fit.”

“Yes, he said you said that too. I don’t see how I can help.”

“I don’t either—until we chat.”

Several seconds of silence before, “Sebastian can be very… Especially these days. Are you free tomorrow?”

I said I was, except first thing.

“Best not come here. Let’s see, I have… There’s a coffee shop on First Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. I’ll meet you there at noon.”

I knew the place from her Basilisk file. I told her noon was fine.

It was a start. With a mental nod to Marianna Leitz, I fetched the vodka bottle and two glasses from the kitchen. Foos was tapping away at his keyboard, but he indicated yes when I held up the bottle. I poured two shots.

“Want to get something to eat?” I asked.

“Social invitation? Haven’t had one of those in months.”

“Just trying to butter you up until you let me sic the Basilisk on Victoria.”

“You track her down, she tells you to get lost. What’s the rush?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What about dinner?”

“Can’t. Date.”

“Krisztina?”

“Uh-uh. Izabela.”

“What happened to Krisztina?”

“Nothing lasts forever.”

Or in his case, more than a couple off months.

“Izabela—let me guess. Czech?”

“Close. Slovakian. Bratislava.”

“Six feet, blond, legs up to her ears for a change?”

“Jealous.”

Foos is a certified genius, but a decidedly odd-looking guy with a personality to match. Yet he dates an unending series of models, all tall, most blond, most from Eastern Europe, each more drop-dead gorgeous than the last. It’s a continuing source of mystery—and envy—how he manages.

“You and your pal Leitz ever discuss his family?”

“Uh-uh.”

“They’ve got a lot of issues, as they say these days.”

“Not surprised.”

“Why?”

He looked up. “What family doesn’t?”

The loud “arrrr-oooo-gahhhh” of our door horn echoed through the office. One of Foos’s jokes—he thinks it’s hilarious. So does Pig Pen, who squawks “Boss man!” at full volume whenever it goes off. Two men stood outside holding a solid-looking wooden crate. The return address was Leitz’s. It took half an hour and another glass of vodka to yank out the nails and get it open. When I unwrapped the painting inside, Pig Pen took one look and said, “Russky.”

“That’s right, Pig Pen. Famous Russky. Ilya Repin, painter. How did you know?”

He gave me his ‘I’m not the dope you think I am’ look. “Russky.”

“Takes one to know one,” I said. “Maybe you’re part Russian, Pig Pen.”

“Parrot,” he said definitively, meaning, I suppose, that he’s a citizen of the world.

“You like the painting?”

He took a minute to look it over. “Eldo.”

Eldo’s the top rank in his hierarchy. I’d taken him for a ride once in my car, a 1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible I call the Potemkin, with the top down. We’d toured the 1010 WINS “jam cams” around town, and he thought he’d ascended to parrot paradise. Eldo stuck.

“You have a good eye, for a parrot,” I said. “I’ll hang it here for now, where you can see it.”

Pig Pen seemed happy with that arrangement, but I was thinking Repin deserved a better setting than a sterile office wall. I was at the door, headed for 140 West Forty-eighth Street—a fruitless errand to see if Timid and Bold were still around—when something tugged.

Some issues with my son at his school, Leitz had said.

Foos was packing his messenger bag.

“I want to do a little research on the Leitz kid.”

“Wondered when you were going to get around to that.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“That strange computer activity corresponds with school vacations. I told you that.”

I was going to point out he’d said nothing of the sort, but he was already halfway across the floor, bidding good night to Pig Pen. Then it occurred to me that in his way, he had. He’d told me August, November, and December—summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas. That’s Foos. Like his creation, he connects data—and expects the rest of us to be as quick as he is.

I fired up the Basilisk and fed in Andras Leitz. I don’t know what I was looking for, but had I been given any notice of what I’d find—and where it would lead—I’d have shut down the computer, packed up the Repin, sent it back, and sought refuge with one of my Mexican friends south of the border.

It’s not a proverb that I know of, but it should be—you can’t peel back the layers of an onion without drawing tears.

CHAPTER 8

Things started innocently enough. Andras Leitz presented a typical profile of a typical child of wealthy, New York parents—private school, generous allowance, Caribbean Christmases, too many material possessions. Nothing surprising there. Until the beast served up accounts at twelve different banks with balances aggregating $11.2 million.

One account, at Citi, held $2,200 and was the recipient of what appeared to be a regular allowance, a hundred dollars a week, via electronic transfer from his father’s account at the same bank. The others were funded by monthly transfers from a corporate account at State Street Bank in Boston. Those had been increasing steadily over time and now averaged about $20,000 each. They stretched back two and a half years. The most recent was a week earlier—$22,887.63. In all, they totaled just over $7 million. The other $4 million had been deposited, again electronically, in two installments, one in August ($1.5 million) and one at Thanksgiving ($2.5 million). The source of these two transfers was a bank in Estonia. And, as Foos said, the timing lined up with school vacations.

Hard to see how a seventeen-year-old came into that kind of money. Hard to guess what he was up to in the Baltics. Perhaps he copied a few of his old man’s trades. The Basilisk guffawed at that idea. So did twenty years of Cheka training and experience. But even assuming for the sake of argument that he was as bent as a world-class crook, how was a high school kid pulling down that kind of dough? I wondered, not idly, whether the elder Leitz had any inkling of his offspring’s success.

Back to the data. The Boston connection was explained, possibly, by the fact that Andras was a student at a boarding school in Gibbet, Massachusetts, fifty miles west of the capital, with the same name as the town. Tuition, room and board were setting his old man back $48,000 a year. Andras could have easily picked up the tab himself. I brought up the phone records. Calls to his father in New York, mother in Minneapolis, and a handful of what appeared to be friends. Most went to a woman named Irina Lishina. That surname rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.

I sent the beast back with a new assignment. He (I’ve always assumed he’s a he) came back with another profile.

Irina was also a student at the Gibbet School. Like Andras, she lived in New York City, at 22 East Ninety-second Street, with her mother, Alyona, and her stepfather, Taras Batkin. That name rang a bell too.

Google jogged my memory. Batkin was chairman of the Russian-American Trade Council. At the time I left the Cheka, he’d been a fast-rising officer, a comer. We’d never met, but he got talked about a lot. In more recent years, he was rumored to be a Kremlin fixer, one of those people trusted with looking after the government’s connections with private enterprise—legal and otherwise. Irina’s father was Alexander Lishin, and I remembered why I recognized his name. He was a regular fixture on Ibansk.com—a crook, major league. I could access more information on them at home. I went back to the girl.

She had a BMW 328i registered in her name in New York. She carried three credit cards with aggregate average monthly charges of about $900. Her checking account contained just over $10,000. Typical child of a typical Russian official—if said official is in a position to have his hand in all kinds of extracurricular enterprises.

That was before the savings and brokerage accounts. Like Andras, more than a dozen spread among eight banks as well as Fidelity, Schwab and E-Trade. They totaled more than $11 million and were fed by the same corporate account at State Street Bank. Just like him, she had two deposits from Estonia, $1.5 mil in November and $2.5 million a month later. Russia’s producing some very accomplished young women these days, but a self-made high school multimillionaire seemed a reach. Unless she’d joined the family firm. That seemed a bigger reach. And what was Andras doing?

I went home to continue my research, after the detour to West Forty-eighth Street. Timid and Bold were nowhere among the gathering cleaners. None of those getting ready for work professed ever to have heard of them. I wasn’t surprised. Having gotten everything they could from both Nosferatu and me, they’d doubtless decided another cleaning job at another building—probably in Pittsburgh—was in order. Their countrymen were quick to forget all about them.

Dinner was a solitary affair—me, takeout Chinese washed down by Russian vodka and Czech beer, Herbie Nichols on the CD player, and Ibansk.com on the computer. Nichols is an overlooked hard-bop pianist who didn’t make many records, but the ones he did get down swing harder than Paul Bunyan’s ax.

Ivanov swings his own ax, and tonight Efim Konychev was again the target.

I searched the Ibansk database for mentions of Konychev, Alexander Lishin, and the BEC. It returned more than two hundred posts. Some contained just a mention, in others, Ivanov ran on at his histrionic and long-winded best. I sent the full lot to the printer while I finished my takeout, rinsed the dishes, and opened another Pilsner Urquell. Then I settled in on the sofa with the beer, a thick stack of printed pages, and a notepad. Two hours and another Pilsner later I had as good a picture of the BEC as one was likely to get.

Konychev and Lishin were the founding partners. Konychev had already made one fortune in TV and radio. He was one of the first to appreciate the Web’s potential for criminal enterprise and, more significantly, that criminals would need places—holes in the cyberspace wall, if you will—to run their scams from. Lishin, according to Ivanov, was the technical genius, the man who connected servers spread all over Eastern Europe, and more important, told them what to do when ordered.

The genius of the BEC is that, technically, it does nothing illegal itself. It simply provides services—Web hosting, data storage—to those who need them. Spammers need memory and processing power to send all those billions of e-mails advertising everything from cheap drugs to bigger body parts. Phishers need the same capabilities from which to con unsuspecting recipients—Danger! Your account is about to be closed!—into giving up their user names, passwords, and Social Security numbers. Higher-tech crooks have similar requirements—putting together zombie networks to launch distributed denial of service attacks, the basis for their blackmail schemes, aimed at shutting down companies’ or countries’ Web presences by swamping them with bogus inquiries. Ditto pornographers.

The thing about computers, they don’t care what they do. Memory is memory, it can store whatever it’s ordered to store. A CPU is a CPU, it can run any app it’s given. Having set up the technical infrastructure, the incremental cost to the BEC of expanding into other lines was virtually nil. Konychev built the client contacts, Lishin built out the network and the software. All kinds of Internet scum were only too happy to avail themselves of BEC facilities. The BEC blew through the dot-com crash in 2000, and when the global economy sunk like the Titanic in 2008, the BEC kept swimming in a rising sea of cash. The business just kept growing.

That inevitably attracted the Kremlin’s attention. In most Western countries—those governed by the rule of law, for instance—the government would have invested money and manpower trying to shut such a network down and prosecute those behind it. In Russia, where rule of force equals rule of law, the Kremlin summoned Konychev and Lishin to a meeting and put a deal on the table. Cut us in or spend the next twenty years in a cell down the hall from Khodorkovsky in Siberia.

They were quick to agree. A third partner joined the firm, Taras Batkin. His Cheka background and Kremlin contacts gave the BEC another layer of insulation. Business grew faster than ever. Somewhere along the line, Konychev’s younger sister, Alyona, who had been married to Lishin for more than a decade, took up with Batkin. The divorce and new marriage, about six months apart, had taken place three years earlier, apparently without incident. Nobody wanted to upset the apple cart carrying the golden goose, or so my cynical mind suggested. I put the mixed metaphor down to too much Pilsner Urquell.

I finished reading and went back to the computer. Ivanov had no pictures of either Lishin or his ex-wife, but he did have one of Konychev, accompanying his latest post. Taken with a long telephoto lens, it showed the same man I’d seen on Tverskaya, wearing an overcoat and scarf, climbing out of the backseat of another armored Mercedes. A bodyguard held the door from behind, another stood in front, partially blocking the camera’s view. His hand reached under his overcoat, no doubt wrapped around a large caliber firearm. Konychev looked straight at the camera, unaware of its presence. Handsome face, soft features, intelligent eyes. Hard to read much into them.

Something behind his head caught my attention, and I leaned in for a closer look. The number of the building, large brass digits affixed to a marble façade—140. The same “1” and “4” and “0” that adorned the exterior of 140 West Forty-eighth Street—Leitz’s building. That could be coincidence, plenty of buildings with the number “140” in plenty of cities. Maybe even one or two that used the same stencils. The Mercedes had New York plates. Still, Konychev could be going to visit any one of a score of tenants. He could have been going to the building next door. Everything about his presence in New York could have been coincidence, but I was ready to bet my newly acquired Repin that Konychev was paying a visit to Sebastian Leitz.

CHAPTER 9

I got up at my usual 6:00 A.M. and ran a half mile downtown until I found a pay phone I hadn’t hit in a while. I used a prepaid card to dial Aleksei’s office in Moscow.

“Good morning,” I said. “Feel like coffee? I’m buying.”

A brief pause, then, “Give me forty-five minutes. Usual place?”

“Fine.”

I continued my run, five miles through the cold, dark, empty streets, thinking about the Leitzes, Efim Konychev, the honesty of my client, and how far I wanted to take this. A million dollars is a million dollars, I reminded myself more than once, and I still had a clear vision of Suprematist Composition on Leitz’s wall that I could transfer easily enough to my own. A stiff wind kept me away from the rivers, I ran fast and was early getting back so I reversed direction and trotted up to City Hall where I found another pay phone and dialed another number, this one belonging to a disposable cell phone.

Aleksei answered on the first ring. I wouldn’t describe either of us as paranoid, at least not overly so. I spied on the United States for twenty years, and I suspect there are some old members of the U.S. intelligence community who are sufficiently curious about what I’m up to these days to listen in to the occasional phone call. Aleksei has more immediate reasons to worry. He’s an honest cop in a system where honesty is not only shunned but feared. That makes him a target, and there’s little question that his phone is tapped. We’d agreed on one thing when we saw each other in Moscow—a system for getting in touch, using phones that can’t be traced and a fake coffee date to set a time.

“How’re you doing?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

“Bad day?”

“One more in a sequence.”

“Sorry. Work?”

“Among other things.”

I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I didn’t want to appear uncaring either.

“Your mother?”

“Bad subject.”

The Cheka stomped in, wearing high leather boots with steep heels, Lavrenty Pavlovich at the head of the column.

“Maybe I should call another day.”

“You’re on the phone now. You wouldn’t have called unless you wanted something.”

Ouch. And true. “Aleksei, I…”

“Don’t. I’m sorry. That wasn’t called for. It’s been a bad few days, as I said.”

“You’re right, though. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m just not used to…”

“I understand. It’s your kopek.”

“All right. Efim Konychev.”

Pause. “What about him?” His tone had been sour. Now it was sour and on guard.

“I might be bumping up against him.”

“Be careful.”

“I figured that out. Ivanov says he’s been in hiding since the Tverskaya attack.”

“I guess so.”

Sour, on guard, and evasive.

“Any idea why he’s showing himself now, or why the Feds here are letting him into the country, or why he’d want to be let in?”

A pause before he said, “I can’t talk about that.”

So the CPS was involved. “He causing your string of bad days?”

“You’re not listening to me.” Annoyance in his voice now.

Change the subject. “You ever run across a very tall Belarusian, maybe six seven, bald, pockmarked face, bad teeth, exceptional strength?”

There was a longer pause this time. “Why?”

“He laid a pretty good thumping on your old man a few nights ago. More than that, he seemed to know all about me, which suggests certain connections.”

“That’s your department.”

I let that go.

His voice softened. “Okay, few nights ago? Where?”

“Here. Second Avenue. He had four guys with him, but they could’ve been rent-a-thugs.”

The voice changed. “What are you working on?”

“Something I can’t talk about.”

Another pause. “I’ve heard about a man like that. Knack of appearing out of nowhere. Superhuman strength. Don’t know his name, no one does. Lots of stories, though. He likes to tie people up conscious and slit their wrists so they feel themselves die. If he has time. Otherwise, he just breaks their necks—with his hands.”

I was starting to look lucky.

“He’s supposed to be the chief enforcer of the Baltic Enterprise Commission.”

The connection I was looking for. I paused before I played my next card. I told myself I hadn’t been sure I wanted to when I placed the call, but that was rationalization.

“That photo of Konychev yesterday on Ibansk—it was taken outside an office building here in New York. One of the tenants is a big-time Wall Street investor, Sebastian Leitz.”

I was listening for curiosity, but he kept his voice flat, intentionally or not. “So?”

“Leitz is bidding on two TV networks here. Sixty-five billion dollars. His computers were bugged eight weeks ago. Right after I discovered that, I got a visit from the bucktoothed Belarusian. I call him Nosferatu, by the way.”

“More coincidences than you can tolerate?”

“One way to sum it up.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“Information. Background. I’m trying to put pieces together, figure out what’s going on.”

“You working for—what’s-his-name?—Leitz?”

“Can’t say.”

A long pause this time. “You think we’ll ever trust each other. I mean, really trust? Both of us?”

I started to answer—I hope so—but he was asking a two-sided question. His lack of trust was given and warranted. We both understood that. He was also asking if I could overcome a lifetime of cynical calculation and trust anyone—him—based on things as ethereal as blood and love.

Beria put in an appearance behind the public phone, wearing his Cheka uniform, pince-nez balanced on his ski-jump nose. Eyes dark and humorless, but not without curiosity.

Not so simple, is it? he said.

Go away, I said.

That’s not so simple, either. I’m here. I’ve always been here. I’ve always been part of it. I’ve always been part of you.

“Hang on,” I said to Aleksei. I let the receiver dangle and walked around the phone stand. The vision vanished. I came back and put the receiver to my ear.

“Sorry, bag lady listening in. I can only say, I’m willing to work on it. I can’t think of much that’s more important.”

“I can tell you’re trying. I hear it now. Keep at it. That’s all I can say. It’s going to take a while.”

“I understand that.” I looked around. Beria was nowhere to be seen.

He said, “I’m still trying to work some things out. You and the Cheka. You and Polina. I can’t say how long it will take. Or make any promises.”

Aleksei used our given names, as he’d done since we’d become reacquainted. I was his father, she’d been his mother, but neither of us had been there much in those roles. I had the unrealistic goal of someday being called Nana—Dad—but I doubted it would ever happen. A price of fate, and my own decisions, which I also understood all too well. I caught another glimpse of Lavrenty Pavlovich, on a park bench, shaking his head. I shook mine. Beria grinned before he evaporated into the cold morning sun.

“I just want to stay in the game. I won’t try to tell you how to play your cards,” I said.

“You told me that once before, remember? Don’t fold, make the other guy go out first.”

“I remember. I didn’t know who I was talking to at the time.”

“Chekists aren’t usually so slow on the uptake. Sorry—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“No offense taken.”

A long pause. “Tell me this, if you can: This man Leitz, he seeing a woman named Alyona Lishina?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Around. You know who she is?”

“Konychev’s sister, ex-wife of Alexander Lishin. Current wife of Taras Batkin. Also the mother of a girl Leitz’s son spends a lot of time with. Why?”

“You’re well informed. We’re interested. But every time we start to ask we run into roadblocks.”

“Cheka roadblocks?”

“What do you think?”

No response to that.

“This your case?”

“Uh-huh.” Another long pause. “We’ve been building a case against the BEC for years, under the Kremlin radar. The problem, as you can appreciate, is that it’s a totally online business. Everything is done in the ether—or what they call the cloud these days. You’re a phisher and you need a base for your phishing expeditions. You have some contacts in the biz, or you visit a few online sites frequented by like-minded crooks. You get checked out, if you pass muster, you get access to a passworded site that’s essentially a shopping mall. Everything you need—applications, storage, memory, processing, protection—all available for sale or rent. You put together your package and use a version of PayPal to pay. You’ve never met anyone, no one’s met you. After a few months, the Web site’s taken down and another set up somewhere else. You get access if you’re still a customer in good standing. Simple, really, and totally anonymous.”

“How did you get on to them?”

“Usual way—get a tip, get lucky, bust a warehouse full of servers. Follow the data, apply pressure, work it up the line. BEC is big enough to require organization, so there is a chain of command, and we followed that. We also tracked the money, which is harder to hide, as you know. It was an international effort, us, the Germans, French, Brits, U.S. DoJ. We followed a half-dozen trails. One of the most productive was a child porn operation over there, busted five or six years ago. That led to the company processing the payments, that led to a couple of European banks, that led to shell companies here.”

“And you think the BEC’s behind them?”

“You asked about Konychev. He runs the BEC, with two partners—Lishin and Batkin. He’s one of yours.”

I ignored the barb. “I read that on Ibansk. Ivanov got his facts right?”

“Yes. Not Konychev’s choice, even if he is his brother-in-law.”

“Ivanov says the partnership was Kremlin enforced.”

“Cheka wanted one of its own on the inside. Surprised?”

Ivanov confirmed. Putin himself reportedly boasted, not long after becoming president, that thousands of Cheka operatives had been dispatched to take control of every government, business and, no doubt, criminal institution. Except…

“Batkin’s based here now.”

“I know. Ambassador Batkin. Russian-American Trade Council. I’m told he sets great store by his title. We’re not allowed to go anywhere near RATC, as I call it. I assume it’s a front for Chekists making their second career in organized crime.” Definitely a bitter edge to his voice now.

“He one of your targets, along with Konychev?”

“Don’t ask. Not that it matters. Lid’s been slammed on. Right at the time when the BEC leadership’s in disarray.”

He made no attempt to hide the frustration.

“Who’s being protected?”

“Everyone and anyone, as usual. Watch your step. The tall guy who beat you up, he probably still works for Konychev.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“I hope you do.… I mean that.”

“I mean it too.”

CHAPTER 10

I walked home, Beria by my side.

He doesn’t trust you.

What do you know?

I’m the Cheka. I know everything.

I let him keep me company. It was his ground we were covering. Nobody stopped to ask, Who’s he? Why are you talking to him? Nobody paid us any mind.

This morning’s conversation with Aleksei had been the longest since dinner in Moscow when he’d walked out. We’d met twice while I was there. I’d gone looking for, if not reconciliation, at least a start down that road. I was prepared to tell him the truth about my past—the Gulag, the Great Disintegration of my marriage to his mother—and was terrified of his reaction. I hoped he wouldn’t hold it all against me. I was most worried about the shame of the Gulag and how badly Polina had poisoned the well. I found I had bigger problems. I should have seen them coming—he’d been more than clear last summer—but one of the hardest prisons to break out of is your own point of view.

The first meeting took place two nights after I arrived, at a restaurant the hotel concierge recommended. I wouldn’t be seeking his advice again. A dark, close cave, carved out of the basement of an old building near the Kremlin walls, with atmosphere to match. The raucous laughter from an American tour group bounced around the subterranean room, growing in volume as the waiter brought more vodka. The food was a jumble of Russian standards and what’s called “continental”—a menu of generic dishes that could have been concocted anywhere. Aleksei was in a bad mood, for reasons he wouldn’t specify. I suggested we move venues, but he waved with indifference and said this place was fine. I could barely hear, he didn’t have much to say, and I failed to find a path to get a conversation moving.

Outside, afterward, in the cold winter air, he apologized. “My fault. Nothing to do with you. It’s… Just a bad few days. How about we try again Thursday? I’ll choose a place.”

I walked back to the Metropole, hopefulness over the next meeting tempered by the sense that one opportunity had been wasted and I wouldn’t get too many more. I also wondered how often the “bad few days” came around.

The second meeting started well enough. His choice was a small neighborhood café, above ground and airy, even in the winter dark, with a limited, but appetizing menu and good draft beer. His mood seemed better, if still distant. That was to be expected, I supposed. I had suggested meeting at his apartment—I was curious to see where, and how, he lived—but he quickly parried that. I wondered if we were in his neighborhood. In New York, the Basilisk could have told me in an instant. As Foos is fond of pointing out to anyone who’ll listen, Europeans—including Russians—are more protective of their data.

Aleksei was at a table by the window when I arrived. He wore a dark jacket over a navy turtleneck and wool trousers. Two inches taller and thirty pounds lighter than I am, his thick black curly hair was close to needing a trim, but still kempt. He’d been described as resembling a young Mark Twain, and it fit. The black eye patch was in place—the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone gunned down Andrei Kozlov, first deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, in 2006. The someone, of course, was widely presumed to be working for the Cheka.

We’d given the waitress our orders—meat for him, fish for me—when he said, “Okay, tell the story.”

I was taken aback by the abruptness of the request—or command, hard to tell which.

“What story do you want to hear?”

“You and Polina. You and Iakov. You and the Cheka. Where you came from. Why you left. Why you live in New York. You decide. It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

I listened for emotion—anger, bitterness, resentment, curiosity—but heard none. His voice was flat, almost professional in tone. He was a cop—to the extent he wanted to conduct an interrogation, he’d have a plan for how to go about it.

I didn’t have a plan. I’d thought about it, tried to develop one—before I left New York, on the plane, over the last few days. I still didn’t know where to start.

“What did your mother tell you?”

I assumed, perhaps unfairly, that Polina had imparted the worst. Maybe worse than that, although she wouldn’t necessarily have seen a need to exaggerate.

He shook his head. I thought at first he was refusing to answer. “She didn’t tell me much of anything. I asked, of course. All she said was, we were a family of the damned—doubly damned, was the way she put it.”

“She didn’t say why?”

He shook his head. “She believed it though.”

She would have, no doubt about that. “So you really don’t know anything about me?”

“Only what I learned in New York.”

I was looking at a mostly clean slate—with all the temptations such a vessel presents. I told myself to stick to the facts.

“Let’s start with the Cheka,” I said. “That’ll take us to matters closer to home.”

“It’s your story.”

The voice was still flat. I told the tale of my career, from the Foreign Language Institute through the Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence) to the First Chief Directorate, whose attention in my time was focused almost entirely on the Main Adversary—the United States—and my five assignments abroad.

“Iakov Barsukov was my guide and mentor throughout,” I said.

“That explains one thing.” Something else crept into his voice—anger or bitterness or both.

“What’s that?”

“Why you didn’t shoot the bastard when you had the chance, that night at JFK.”

“I owed him everything. That’s a tough bond to overcome, whatever the provocation.”

“He was a mass murderer. He killed Polina. He tried to kill my sister. As it was, he left her shattered.”

“I can imagine how you feel.”

“Can you?”

The anger flared in his features, then left again, almost as quickly. I didn’t want to get further into that argument, at least, not yet. “I can try.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Pointless death gets under my skin. Who do you think I inherited that from?”

I sidestepped the temptation to give the answer he was expecting—Certainly not your mother. Instead, I said, “Since we’re onto Iakov, let me tell you what happened next.”

The waitress brought the food, and we both ordered another a beer.

While we ate, I took him through the events of the Great Disintegration. In 1988, I was posted in the New York rezidentura for the second time. The rezident—chief of station—Lachko Barsukov, Iakov’s eldest son, was fast climbing a ladder to the top of the Cheka. He’d always been greedy and he was running a side business, ordering everything from Champagne to truffles to designer dresses on the consulate’s tab, shipping it all home, where his brother sold it on the black market. One of my agents exposed him, I turned him in. Iakov leaned on me hard not to testify. I made the worst decision of my life—and I didn’t even know how bad it would turn out to be. Honor versus loyalty. I opted for loyalty. Dumbest thing I’ve ever done. But I was screwed no matter what.

Lachko got away with a slap on the wrist. He was tainted, though, and his ascent was over. He blamed me and sought revenge. He mounted a nasty campaign of innuendo. The whispers got around to Polina. I didn’t realize how much I underestimated the depth of her insecurity. Her alcoholic father had been run out of the GRU (military intelligence) and sent to the camps. She was horrified at the prospect of her life crumbling again—and being married to a zek, although I left that part out for the moment. She set out to ruin me by sleeping with my fellow officers, the kind of indiscretion she knew the Cheka could not ignore. I found out what she was up to before the organization did and made a deal with the devil to save all of us. Polina could raise Aleksei, with my support. I wouldn’t interfere, I wouldn’t even be a known factor. As if I never existed, a zek’s destiny. I didn’t reckon on her marrying Lachko, but I’m not omniscient. In retrospect, she was grasping for security and still trying to get even. He’d always had a thing for her and he wanted to get even too. Iakov pulled some strings and I was given an assignment in San Francisco. That was a time-buyer. I was back in Moscow in two years, behind a desk, which I hated. When the opportunity presented itself to call it quits, I did, and moved to New York. Start over.

“That’s quite a story,” Aleksei said as the waitress cleared our plates. His professional tone was back.

“It’s straight—or as straight as I can remember. A difficult time. Memory plays tricks, as you know. I made a big mistake, I tried to rectify it as best I could. You were one big casualty of that. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, in acknowledgment or acceptance, I wasn’t sure which. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes while we sipped our beer. I had a sense what the next question would be—like staring at a gallows, knowing what it’s to be used for, with nowhere to run. My pulse picked up speed as I waited. I didn’t know for sure how I’d answer.

“How about your childhood? Where’d you grow up?”

Paralysis grabbed my throat. My heart raced, my breath got short.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Aleksei, I…”

He had concern on his face, no doubt over the rising panic on mine.

“The… the reason your mother said we were damned,” I croaked. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. It was all but drowned out by the pounding in my chest.

He was waiting, uncertain what to say or do. I fought for control. I told myself to get on with it. It’s only a word. A word I couldn’t speak.

“G… Gulag,” I finally managed to whisper.

He looked at me quizzically.

“That’s… That’s where I was born. That’s where I grew up. Your mother never knew—until the end. That’s the reason everything fell apart.”

He didn’t jump up. He didn’t run. He didn’t shout NO! He didn’t even look that surprised. He just leaned back and nodded. My heart rate slowed a little.

“Why didn’t you tell her before?” he said after a minute.

“Shame. Fear. I was ashamed of my past. Still am. I can barely tell you about it, today, five decades later. And I was scared about how she’d react. I wasn’t wrong about that.”

He nodded again and crossed his arms. “I have friends whose parents were in the camps. They don’t talk about it either. I kind of understand it, I guess. But, at the same time, there were millions of victims. All Russians share that history. It’s something we need to come to terms with if we’re ever able to confront our past. And we can’t do that without talking about it—openly.”

I could have cried, from tension and relief. My heart rate returned to normal. The shame that haunted me meant nothing to him. I’d spent the last twenty years terrified—for no reason. Maybe there was hope for Russia—if more people of his generation shared his view.

He was watching my reaction. “You were born there, you said. That means your mother…”

“That’s right. She was arrested with her parents during the Terror in 1938. Your great-grandparents were artists and died in the camps. Your grandmother was released in 1946 and rearrested in a roundup of ex-prisoners in 1948. She was sent to Dalstroi this time—Siberia. I was born there on March 15, 1953—the day Stalin and Prokofiev died. Bad timing for Sergei Sergeyevich. We were released in Beria’s amnesty, but she was too weak to make the journey home. She died on the train. I was brought up in an orphanage, got into trouble as a teenager, got sent back to the Gulag. You hate him, I understand that, but it was Iakov Barsukov who identified my language skills and gave me a chance. He got me out of the Gulag and started my career in the Cheka.”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to hear that about Iakov. “What about your father?”

“That’s less clear. The man I’m named after, Electrifikady Turbanevich…”

He was taking a sip of beer. He stopped and laughed out loud. “Say that again.”

“Electrifikady Turbanevich.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. You didn’t know?”

“She never told me. How did you get saddled with… If you don’t mind my asking.” He was still smiling.

“He was the man I believed to be my father. My mother broke with tradition and gave me the whole name. They didn’t have much time together. ’Forty-six to ’forty-eight, then a supposed reunion in Kolyma in ’fifty-two. She wanted a way to remember him, I guess.”

“Okay, but how did he get…”

“Stalinist zeal. He was born in the thirties. Lots of kids got screwy patriotic names—Ninel, Stalina, Drazdraperma. Apparently Grandpa Turba was a Stalinist with a sense of humor.”

“Unlikely combination.”

“The czars couldn’t kill Russian humor, neither could the Bolsheviks.”

“What did he do, your father?”

“He was a Chekist. On Beria’s staff.”

He started at that.

“He was a zek too. Arrested with my mother in forty-six. Rejoined the Cheka sometime after he was released in forty-eight. That wasn’t unheard of, by any means.”

“And it still took Iakov and your language skills to get you out?”

“I don’t think he had any idea I existed.”

“The Cheka would have.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I haven’t been able to find those records. And I’ve been looking.”

“And your Grandpa Turba—the funny Stalinist—what about him?”

“He worked for Dzerzhinsky.”

“Dzerzhinsky!? As in Felix, founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky?”

“That’s right. Turba helped set it up. He was also an early victim—he was purged and sent to the camps to die in 1937.”

“And you still believe Iakov just happened to pick you out of a crowd of zeks?”

“Yes. Why?”

“You’ve got Cheka royalty running through your blood, and you can ask that?”

“I didn’t know any of this until after my career was over. I learned it all since I moved to New York.”

The waitress offered coffee. Aleksei declined. I did as well. He retreated to his thoughts, and I left him there.

A good ten minutes passed before he said, “We joked in New York about you being the first ex-Chekist. I almost believed it at the time. I guess I wanted to believe it, once I figured you were my father. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Why not? What’s changed?”

Another long wait before he said, “That night at JFK, with Iakov—seems to me, looking back now, the whole thing could’ve been a setup. I wandered into it, and you improvised.”

“I improvised, that’s true. To get you out of there.”

“Maybe. The Cheka cuts too deeply into all of us, I guess.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You didn’t tell Polina about your Gulag past. You say you were ashamed, you say you were scared. Now you tell me how each of my ancestors is more deeply wired into the Cheka than the next. What’s the motivation this time?”

“I don’t see what you’re driving at. I spent the last twenty years trying to find out about my past because I hoped… I hoped some day to have the chance to tell you where you came from.”

“And you thought I’d be as proud of it—the Cheka part—as you are?”

I had no idea how to respond. “I don’t see where pride enters into it,” I said after a moment.

“Don’t you?” His voice was full of feeling now. Anger, bitterness, resentment raced each other to the fore. An explosion was coming, and I was responsible. But what could I have told him differently?

“Aleksei, listen, I’m sorry. I thought… I thought you’d want to know.”

Did I sound as lame to him as I did to myself?

He answered that question by pulling a bundle of notes out of his pocket. He counted off several and tucked them under his empty beer glass.

“Maybe you thought wrong.”

He stood and left, grabbing his overcoat from the rack without stopping. I didn’t try to follow.

The waitress approached hesitantly. I held out the dish of money and ordered a vodka. Half an hour later, having ordered and drunk another, I was still trying to figure out what had happened. I’d underestimated whatever was eating at him as badly as I had his mother a lifetime earlier.

I tried calling him several times over the next two days, but he was busy or avoiding me. Then I had dinner with Sasha and he dropped the hammer about Beria. How would I ever explain that—if I got the chance?

CHAPTER 11

Beria disappeared at the South Street Seaport. I got home to find my neighbors, Tina and John, loading suitcases into a cab.

“Going skiing,” Tina piped in her eternally upbeat way. Tina’s very sweet and what Americans unkindly call an airhead. I think it’s both sexist and unfair to rank a woman’s brains ahead of her other attributes, which Tina has in abundance. Today, her coat was open and her woolly sweater and leather pants stretched tight over her full figure. I tried not to observe too closely since her husband, a former linebacker for the New York Giants, is Foos’s size and solid muscle. I told them to have a good trip and went upstairs to shower.

I got the Potemkin out of the garage and drove to Bedford. It’s a foolish car, especially in winter when you can’t put the top down and a rear-wheel-drive boat is useless in snow and ice. But I don’t get a chance to drive much, and I love the feel of a battleship, albeit an American battleship, on the road.

Marianna Leitz lived on East Meadow Road, a winding, empty country lane lined by old maples, white fences, and stone walls demarcating horse farms and big estates. I found her driveway between two large columns with an electronic gate and a security camera. The gate was open.

I stopped outside to check my messages. A gray Toyota Camry rolled past and disappeared around a bend. I listened to a Gatling-gun recording from Julia Leitz recounting all of the important things she was working on, none of which meant anything to me, before she said, “I might be able to do six, if this deal doesn’t blow. If that happens, all bets are off. Come here at six, but call first. I could be in crisis mode.” Sounded like crisis mode was a perpetual state she rather enjoyed, as her brother said. Nothing from Leitz’s ex-wife or brother-in-law or brother.

The Camry came back the other way. The driver turned his head as he passed. A balding man of about my age. Maybe he was lost. Or maybe he was working.

Marianna’s driveway was long, and the house, when it finally came into view, grand, white, and handsome. Big, bare-branched trees dotted the wide, snow-covered lawn. A fenced pool area to one side, tennis court nearby, and a large children’s jungle gym–swing complex opposite.

It took a few minutes before she answered the door. She would have been attractive on a good day, but good days had been few and far between in recent months. She looked like hell this morning. Deep creases marred an otherwise fine face. Gray-brown bags hung from brown eyes surrounded by roadmap-red whites. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and had made no attempt at makeup. Her shoulder-length blond hair frizzed in every direction. She didn’t remotely resemble a rich woman living in the lap of luxury. She made a meager effort to smile hello, accompanied by an attempt at a limp handshake, which she couldn’t quite manage.

She led me through an entrance hall and a dining room that sat twenty into a sprawling kitchen. Dirty dishes filled the double sink and spilled onto the countertop.

“Sorry,” she said, waving carelessly in their direction. “I’m a little behind.”

That was an opening, but I let it pass. Better to let her decide when to tell her story.

“I appreciate you taking the time to see me.”

She tried to smile again. “Distraction is a good thing these days. Coffee?”

I had the uncharitable feeling the coffee might be the same vintage as the dishes. I declined. She went to the counter and poured herself a cup. She kept her back to me as she took a bottle from the cabinet, added a shot and put the bottle back. Self-medicating, the attempt to hide it more form than function. I know the signs, the feeling. I’ve done it myself.

Marianna pointed to a table with four chairs by the window. It had a view of the swing set and jungle gym.

“Like I said, I appreciate your time.”

She waved again. Time was one thing she had in abundance and didn’t want.

“I’m wondering if you’ve been visited by anyone asking about your brother.”

“Sebastian called, said you’d be asking. I told him… no.”

Her voice was tentative, even through the booze.

“I can understand that, but…”

“But what?”

“I’m working for your brother, I’m trying to help. I don’t have to tell him everything people tell me.” I let that sink in. “There was someone, right?”

She looked around and nodded. “I… I don’t know why I didn’t tell him, except with everything else… he can be so controlling… I just didn’t feel like it, you know? He’s got his problems, I’ve got mine.”

“Sure. Everybody does. Who were they? What did they ask? This is just between us.”

“I don’t remember too much. They said it was some kind of background check. Everything… Everything’s been a bit of a blur.”

“That’s understandable.” The thing about people who withdraw into themselves, their universe of reference draws in with them. They don’t think about the rest of us—they assume we’re looking at the world from their point of view. Booze helps that process, of course. “What can you remember?”

She took a swallow from her cup. “Two of them, a man and a woman.”

“What did they look like?”

Another wave at the air. “Ordinary. Suits. Business looking. Ordinary looking.”

“Okay. What did they say?”

“Asked a lot of questions. About Sebastian… and the family. Who we were, what we did. It was strange, to tell you the truth. I didn’t say much. The questions… They seemed… intrusive.”

“Did they ask about your… situation?”

Pause, the brain cells trying to clarify. “What do you mean by that?”

My turn to wave at the dishes. “It’s been a rough few weeks, as you said.”

The eyes blurred. “Right. They asked about Sebastian, Jenny, Pauline, the kids, a little, and about Thomas and Julia, but no… not about Jonathan or our children.”

“Did they say who they were?”

“Some law firm. They gave me a card. Not at the beginning. Only when I pressed.”

“You still have it?”

“Somewhere…”

“It could be helpful.”

“Okay.”

She stood, took a minute to get her balance and went off rummaging through kitchen drawers. Partway through the search, she returned to the table for her cup, took it to a cabinet and refilled it from the bottle without bothering to add more coffee. I looked at my watch. 10:14. Even money whether she made it to lunch.

“Ah-ha!”

She returned from the far side of the kitchen, victorious. The card read, ELIZABETH ROGERS, LINDLEY & HILL, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW, with a New York address and phone number, a Web site, and an e-mail address. I made a note of it all for form’s sake.

I wanted to ask an intrusive question of my own. Worst thing she could do was decline to answer, but I was banking on her drinking more now than when Elizabeth Rogers visited.

“How close are you all, Sebastian, your siblings, as a family?”

The eyes clarified again and narrowed. Not as soused as I thought. Her voice took a harder edge. “Why do you ask that?”

“Someone’s trying to hurt your brother—the same people who came to see you, I think. They found a way into his business and to do that they had help. You didn’t give it to them, so I guess I’m asking if there’s any bad blood elsewhere or anything else these people could have exploited.”

She watched me for a minute, stood and left the room. I could hear her voice from elsewhere in the house, talking on the phone. Checking with Leitz HQ.

She returned after a few minutes, sat, drank from her cup, and said, “Sebastian says you should call him.”

“I will, as soon as we’re finished. I’m only trying to help, as I said.” I hoped I sounded sincere.

Another swallow. “What was your question?”

“How do you all get on, the family? Any quarrels? Bad feelings? Ancient, unresolved feuds?”

“No feuds, no. Tensions, I suppose, like any family.”

“What kind of tensions?”

She thought for a moment. “Personality, mainly. We’re all pretty strong minded. Sebastian and Julia have their careers. Thomas has his… passions. Sometimes they go off in different directions. I’ve always been the easy-going one, willing to do whatever, if that kept the peace. But then, I always figured I was the one who had it all worked out—the marriage, the family…”

She banged her fists on the table in front of her and dropped her head on top of them, facedown. The cup fell on its side, spilling a puddle of brown liquid. She sobbed into balled fingers. I picked up the cup, wiped up the puddle with a well-used dish towel, found the brandy bottle in the cabinet—Presidente—and poured a few fingers. I felt no qualms about aiding and abetting. I wanted her to talk, and she’d be back at the sauce with or without my help. I put the cup on the table, reclaimed my seat, and took a chance.

“I’m sorry, Marianna. I know a little about your husband. Nobody should have to deal with what you’re going through.”

She kept crying. Two more minutes passed before she looked up, another second and half before she reached for the cup. She took two swallows before she straightened and looked at me, red-eyed.

“I’m sorry. I’m still not… It’s just so… Where were we?”

“You were talking about keeping the peace—in the family.”

She nodded, grabbing at something that wasn’t her own misery.

“Like I said, we’re all strong minded. The result of our parents dying when we were still young, I think. A car accident—you know that, right?”

I didn’t, but I’d accomplished getting on the inside of her story.

“Tell me.”

“I was fifteen, Sebastian was eighteen, Julia, fourteen, and Thomas, eight. Thomas suffered most, I think, the youngest—and a tough age. Anyway, we were a teenaged immigrant family, and we had to make do. We did, we all stayed in school, we all worked too. Sebastian was the oldest, so he was de facto head of household, and it suited him. He watched out over all of us, he always made sure we were okay, but… as we all grew older, became adults, he never backed off. He still treats us as if we’re teenagers cast adrift. He can be overprotective, and that can grate. Not his fault, he means well. Just the way it is, with everything that happened.”

“How does that manifest, the grating?”

She took a drink and stared out the window at the snow and the swing set.

“He smothers. He tries to control. It’s like, he thinks he’s still responsible for all of us, whatever happens. He can’t understand we all have our own lives now, we’ve made our own way, we’re responsible for our own…”

She stopped short, staring into her cup, realizing where she was going. “Anyway, you know what I mean.”

“Having a brother like that, who cares, isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” I said.

She shook her head, as if agreeing and trying to clear her mind at the same time.

“Not bad. But… It does lead to… tensions.”

“How does he get on with your brother and sister?”

“He and Julia spar all the time. They’re the most competitive. He’s never liked her husband, and he doesn’t approve of the way she takes care of their kids. Doesn’t take care of them, in his opinion. He tries to tell her, she objects, and they end up in a fight. Thomas… Thomas goes his own way, to put it mildly. Sebastian doesn’t understand him, and Thomas doesn’t want him to. Oil and water.”

No way to ask the next question without appearing intrusive, but I hoped she was beyond caring. “Does Thomas have financial problems?”

“What? Why…? How do you know…?” She shook her head. “I’m not going to talk about that.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a difficult subject, I know. I only ask because money—lack of money, debts—can make someone vulnerable. I think Thomas ran up some big debts. He could be desperate.”

She nodded slowly. “He’s always said it’s impossible to live in New York City on a teacher’s salary. And… have you met him?”

“Not yet.”

“He’s something of a clotheshorse—and he doesn’t shop discount, like Julia. I… I tried to help him out from time to time. But…”

I waited.

“I shouldn’t tell you this.”

Intuition—often a spy’s best friend—said don’t push it.

“I can’t force you.”

She took another drink. “I lent him some money, years ago. Fifteen thousand. Six, seven years ago, I don’t remember. He was frantic. I had the cash, he needed it. He kept promising to repay, of course, and I chased him for a couple of years without success. My husband was furious when he found out. Threatened to go to Sebastian. I urged him not to. It was family, what could I do? It was my problem, I said I’d deal with it. Eventually, it went the way of all things… subsumed by time and other concerns. He came to me one other time. Right around the time… I guess it was four years ago. Twenty-five thousand dollars. I was stunned. I had no idea.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“No. I didn’t have that kind of cash this time. And I realized something was wrong, badly wrong. I urged him to get help.”

“How did he react?”

“Badly. We were in the city, at a restaurant. He called me a horrible name, loud enough for the whole place to hear. We fought and he walked out.”

“And he hasn’t asked again? Recently?” I was thinking of the $35,000 he’d paid off in November.

“No. I don’t see Thomas much these days. I’ve… I’ve had my own problems to worry about.”

“Would he have gone to your brother or Julia for a loan?”

“Not Sebastian. They argued over money before. You know about his temper…”

I nodded. “What about Julia?”

“Maybe. They’re not that close. And he’d have to get her attention.”

“Meaning?” Although I knew the answer.

“Julia is what people politely call a workaholic. She never leaves the office. Barely has time for her own family.”

“What about her husband? Would he have gone to him?”

“Oh no.” The answer came fast, too fast, not as if she were trying to head me off, but a knee-jerk response, as though the idea itself was preposterous.

“Why not?” I said as innocently as I knew how.

She shook her head. “He just wouldn’t. That’s all.”

That wasn’t remotely all, but intuition intervened again—don’t press it, move on. I took a shot at another question, half expecting it to bring the interview to a close.

“What happened to Sebastian’s first marriage?”

She shook her head and looked out the window.

I waited.

She shook her head again and started to cry. I’d lost her.

“You know… You think your problems are the worst anyone could have. Then…”

She balled her fists and hit the table again, grabbed the cup, and emptied it.

“Maybe I’ll join you,” I said, and went to the cabinet. I poured her a healthy shot, found a cup that looked clean, and gave myself a finger and half.

I put the cups on the table and she reached for hers hungrily. I took a sip from mine. Presidente burned, not unpleasantly, on the way down.

“We don’t talk about it, you know. We never have. Unwritten rule. Forbidden subject. Taboo.”

I waited again. Booze versus taboo—I was betting on booze, and the need to unburden.

“It was four years ago now. Sebastian had two kids with his first wife, Pauline—Andras and Daria. Daria was twelve when…”

The fists balled once more, and the head fell on top. Her whole body heaved with sobs. She tried to talk in between. I had to lean forward to make out the muffled, tear-and-brandy-soaked voice.

“She… she had… she had a gun and… she shot… shot herself… in her room. She… she laid down a plastic drop cloth first so she wouldn’t make a mess. Oh dear God, why? It was so horrible. We were all there. We all saw the body. Thomas… poor Thomas he got there first, he was in the upstairs bathroom. He… hasn’t been the same. None… None of us has.”

I waited until the sobbing subsided.

“Does anyone know why she did it?”

She looked up, eyes wet and blurred. “No. Daria… She was always such a happy girl. Her brother’s the moody one, Andras. Daria was always smiling, laughing. I can still see her—those big blue eyes, blond curls…”

She broke down sobbing again. I didn’t try to intervene. Several minutes passed before she looked up again.

“It devastated Pauline. She suffered some kind of breakdown. Spent time in an institution. Sebastian stuck by her until she announced she had to leave. She moved back to Minnesota, where’s she’s from.”

Had to leave. Does a mother have to leave her family, her kids? My mother held me until she died on a train somewhere in the Urals. Polina abandoned Aleksei. But I always figured that was my fault.

“Was there an investigation?”

“The police came, of course, questioned all of us. They ruled it a suicide. She’d taken the gun from a friend’s house a few days before.”

That indicated some degree of premeditation on the girl’s part, but I didn’t need to point that out. I said, “I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up painful memories.”

She nodded and looked into her cup. “Like I said, we don’t talk about it, but it’s always there, you know, like an ache you can’t get rid of. Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge it, put it out in the open.”

“Your brother—Sebastian, I mean—he doesn’t agree with you?”

“No. I mentioned Daria once, about six months after it happened. He got so angry, he totally lost it, threw things… I thought he was going to hit me. I never tried again. Neither has anyone else, so far as I know.”

Her cup was empty. I went to the cabinet and poured another shot. I caught my refection in the window as I returned to the table and turned to ignore it. Aleksei wasn’t wrong in his digs—you learn to be a bastard in the Cheka.

“What’s Andras like?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“As a kid. You said he’s moody. He must have been affected by his sister’s death.”

“Of course he was. But…”

I waited once more.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see that much of him. He went away to school.”

“You see him at Christmas?”

“Yes… I guess so. Sebastian had the usual family get-together. He was there.”

“How did he seem?”

“Fine, I guess. I didn’t really notice, to tell you the truth.”

That was probably true. The booze would have had an impact. But I also sensed there was something she wasn’t telling me.

“Have you met his girlfriend?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know he…”

“Girl from his school. She lives in New York. Irina’s her name.”

She shook her head again. The name didn’t register. Her eyes blurred again. The booze was working its will.

“I have to ask one more question,” I said. “I’m sorry. Your husband. What happened?”

She clutched the cup in both hands and looked up, eyes open wide and angry.

“What happened? WHAT HAPPENED? He fucks every woman he can sweet-talk into bed, that’s what. TWAT, TWAT, TWAT! THAT’S ALL HE CARES ABOUT! Not me, not the kids, just…”

She threw the cup across the kitchen. Brandy splattered on the wall, but the cup rolled to the floor, unbroken.

“GET OUT!”

I’d found the line and crossed it, in best Cheka fashion.

I picked up the cup and wiped down the wall with another dish towel.

I put the cup in front of her and said good-bye. She was crying again and didn’t look up.

When I walked out to the car, I looked back to see her watching me from the door, cup in hand—hers or mine, I wasn’t sure. I had the distinct impression she was making sure I really left. But she could have been waiting until I was out of sight to pour another drink.

CHAPTER 12

Still feeling like a heel, I found a parking place on First Avenue, a block from Jenny Leitz’s coffee shop. I was a few minutes early. I’d taken my time, driving slowly along East Meadow Road until I approached the county highway that would take me to I-684. I pulled over and put my cell phone to my ear. A minute later, the gray Camry appeared in the rearview mirror. I tried again to get a look at the driver but he gave me the back of his balding head a second time. The car went right toward the interstate. I let him get a good head start.

Leitz was on my message machine, shouting orders. “Call me immediately! This harassment of my family has gone far enough!”

I saw no point in engaging his temper, and I had a hunch Jenny hadn’t told him we were meeting. Two good reasons not to call him back. By the time I reached the highway, there were no gray Camrys in sight. I didn’t see any on the drive back to Manhattan.

The coffee shop was long and narrow. A counter with stools down one side, booths along the opposite wall. The woman I made as Jenny sat in a booth facing the door, halfway down the aisle. She made me too, and stood as I approached. The antithesis of her sister-in-law Marianna—in appearance and feeling. No more than five feet tall, with narrow shoulders, tucked waist, and trim hips. If Leitz rolled over in bed, he’d smother her. Her black hair was cut short, which showed off her big eyes and smooth Oriental features. She wore red-framed glasses, a purple top, rose-pink silk pants, and two rings—a big shiny rock and a gold band—on her left hand.

“You must be Turbo,” she said. “I’m Jenny. Nice to meet you.”

Something was wrong. The way she moved. She’d been tentative climbing out of the booth, and she was careful to balance herself as she stood, her hand on the table top. Now, she slid deliberately back into her seat. When she got settled, I saw the sadness and worry behind the glasses. Jenny Leitz was making the most of it, but she was not a well woman.

She had a bowl of soup and a glass of water in front of her. I ordered coffee and an English muffin. She waited until the waitress moved away and said, “You’ve been with Marianna.”

News traveled fast in the Leitz family. Not necessarily good, for my purposes.

“That’s right. She call you?”

Jenny shook her head. “Sebastian told me, when I said I was meeting you. He wants you to call him.”

So much for my hunch. No secrets in the Leitz family. At least, not unimportant ones.

“How is she?” Jenny asked with a concern that was far from perfunctory.

“Not good. Unhappy, depressed, drinking too much. For openers.”

Jenny nodded. “Her husband. She told me all about it. It’s killing her. She won’t let anyone help.”

I must have looked perplexed.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “She told me, not Sebastian. He thinks everything’s fine. It’s our secret.”

“But…”

“Sebastian can be difficult, as you know. He told me what happened at the office. The conference table…”

I nodded.

“His intentions are good—he wants to make things better. He doesn’t understand that’s not always possible—or even desirable. It may not be what the other person wants. Then there’s his temper. It’s hard for Marianna, or others, to confide in him.”

I took a shot. The odds were comparable to holding a four-card straight and hoping to draw the fifth, at either end—not short, not too long either.

“That apply to you as well?”

The straight filled. The black-brown eyes behind the red frames withdrew, just for a moment.

“We have our problems, like any married couple. Tell me what you want you want to know.”

“There are people asking about your husband. People who want to do him harm. They went to see Marianna. She didn’t help them, at least I don’t think she did. But if they went to her, I assume they’ve been making the rounds of the family.”

“Not me,” she said.

I nodded. I didn’t think they’d be brazen enough to brace the wife. “I’m sorry to ask it this way. But… your husband is difficult, as you say, which for me means uncommunicative. I’m trying to determine if anyone in the family might be willing to help these people.”

She shook her head. “No one. It’s a family, like any other. Well, maybe not exactly like any other, but a family with all the usual jealousies, peeves, and resentments. But I don’t believe for a minute anyone wants to do real harm to anyone else, including Sebastian.”

“Marianna said your husband can be very controlling…”

“That’s true, but I still don’t believe anyone means him harm.”

“Thomas? Marianna says he and Sebastian don’t always see eye to eye.”

“That’s true too, but no, I don’t think so.”

“Even if he had financial problems?”

“He’s had those in the past. He went to Sebastian for help.”

“Recently?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Would you be?”

She paused a beat, for emphasis, her eyes holding mine, before she said, “Yes.”

“What about Julia, or her husband?”

“Julia and Sebastian depend on each other in their own unique way. Walter… I can’t say for sure. I hardly know him, to tell the truth.”

“You don’t get along?”

“No, not that. He’s… He’s just never around. I’ve only met him a few times. Of course, we don’t see much of Julia either. She’s always working on something. Neither of them were at our wedding, now that I think about it. But I still don’t think he’d do anything to hurt Sebastian.”

She made each statement calmly and good-naturedly. But Walter Coryell bore looking into.

“I’m sure you’re right about no one wanting to hurt your husband. But do you think anyone could be compelled—bribed, blackmailed, pressured—into helping bug your husband’s computers?”

“I think if anyone tried to get them to do that, Sebastian would be the first to know.” She smiled. “He said you’d ask me to spill the family beans.”

“I suppose I am, but I’m only looking for points of exposure.”

“That’s another way of saying secrets, isn’t it?” She smiled again.

“If you say so.”

“I’m a relatively recent arrival. Not much help, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me this. Anyone in the family really good with computers?”

She smiled once more. “That would be Andras, Sebastian’s son. He’s a whiz.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Surely you don’t think he’s the culprit!”

“No.” Though I was tempted to mention eleven million reasons why he could be. “Just trying to get as complete a picture as I can. Marianna says he’s moody.”

She thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t put it that way. Quiet, certainly. Introspective. He keeps to himself. And he spends too much time online, in my opinion.”

“Your husband doesn’t agree?”

“He eggs him on. He’s thrilled Andras has an interest, something he’s good at.”

She didn’t know the half of it. Neither did he.

“So many children today, they just drift,” she said. “Andras has focus. He’s looking forward to college—computer science, of course. His first two choices are Stanford and Cal Tech. I don’t know who will be more thrilled if he gets in—him or his father. I try not to get too involved. I’m very fond of Andras, but I’m not his mother. She’s still very much on the scene, even from Minnesota, in a good way. That’s her role, not mine.”

“Have you met his girlfriend?”

“The Russian girl? What’s her name?”

“Irina. Irina Lishina.”

“Once. Last summer. She struck me… She struck me as much older than he is, much more experienced. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. He’s quite taken with her, that much was clear. I hope he’s not headed for a hard landing.”

“How long have they been going out?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Since the summer, I think. She goes to the same school.”

I nodded. Time to resume the role of heel. “I only have one more question. You mentioned secrets: What’s yours?”

The eyes retreated behind the lenses. The voice took a less friendly tone. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with doctors in this part of town.”

“How do you know that?” Her hands clutched her soup bowl. The eyes flashed, angry.

“I know a lot of things I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.” I hoped I sounded sincere.

“How?”

“I just know.”

She thought for moment. “It’s Foos, isn’t it? That data-mining machine of his.”

I nodded.

“Shit. He’s told me about it. I never thought about having it turned on me. What did it tell you? I want to know.”

“It takes data like credit card and phone records and looks for patterns, discrepancies from patterns, things that constitute behavior, things that indicate a change in behavior. So it told me about the calls back and forth with the neurologists. It identified the imaging lab. It reported you’ve been spending a fair amount of time here, at the coffee shop, at the bookstore down the street, at the pharmacy on Second and Sixty-eighth, at the nail salon on the next block. The doctors, they’re self-explanatory. The rest suggests a lot of time waiting, between appointments, between tests, so I’m inferring you’re dealing with some complex medical issues. I’m sorry—both that that’s the case and that I had to find out about it.”

“But it didn’t tell you anything about my exact situation, my diagnosis?”

“No. It has some limitations, fortunately.”

“That’s something, at least. And Foos didn’t say anything?”

She’d confided in him—that surprised me. Then again, maybe not.

“Not a word. And I asked him about you.”

She nodded. “He’s a good friend.”

She raised the soup bowl to her mouth and sipped over the lip. Her eyes stayed on me as she gathered her thoughts. I took a swallow of my coffee. Lukewarm.

“I’ve been diagnosed with ALS. You probably know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological disorder, usually terminal.”

“I know what it is. I’m very sorry.” I felt worse than ever—about her, about what I’d found out, about the whole family.

She seemed to read my mind. “Thank you. And don’t worry—you were doing the job Sebastian asked you to do. I don’t hold anything against you. I just found out for sure a few days ago, and I’ve been keeping it close until I could talk with the doctors about the ramifications and possible treatments. I haven’t told anyone, other than a few friends like Foos. Sebastian doesn’t even know. I’ll tell him tonight, now that I have the full picture. I wanted to know everything I could before… They tell me there are drugs now that can slow the progress… There’s also a chance of remission, a small one. I’m not the usual candidate for this illness either, so…”

“If attitude is anything, you’ve got a great shot.” I meant it. A new mother, she was dealing with the worst kind of death sentence with remarkable equanimity. Most people would have been barely functioning.

“I’m trying to stay positive—as positive as I can under the circumstances. We have money, I’ll have the best care. I’ve determined… I determined we should all lead as normal a life as possible. For as long as possible.” She looked up at the clock on the coffee shop wall. “Speaking of appointments, I’ve got one in ten minutes.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. I keep telling myself I’m a lucky person. Everything’ll be fine.”

I watched while she stood carefully and walked down the aisle to the door. She misstepped once ever so slightly, steadying herself on a table before proceeding.

I hoped she was right about being lucky. She was trying hard to believe it.

CHAPTER 13

No call back from Thomas Leitz or Jonathan Stern. I bought an hour on my parking meter and trotted down to the black stone and glass behemoth at Third Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street that housed the headquarters of Marianna’s husband’s company. The lobby guard declined to allow me upstairs. I called Foos for some ammunition, then dialed Stern’s number. His secretary said he was unavailable.

“Please ask Mr. Stern whether he would like to talk to me—now—or whether he would like me to post the following purchases on the Internet, linked to his name.”

I read her the list of lingerie items, each purchased in a different city, all charged to Stern’s corporate American Express card.

“I’m downstairs, I’ll hold on,” I said helpfully.

The woman gulped and went away. Three and half minutes later the guard handed me a building pass, the elevator whisked me to the thirty-third floor, and a good-looking woman in her forties escorted me to a corner office.

A tall man in a striped suit, with fair hair parted in the center and a jutting chin, stood by the window, some papers in his hand. He didn’t offer to introduce himself. The secretary closed the door softly behind her.

“What the hell’s this all about?” Stern said. His voice held neither fear nor anger, just authority. I was a unwanted, unimportant interruption in his day. But not so unimportant that he left me continuing to cool my heels in the lobby.

“The answer to that depends on you,” I said evenly. “You’ve been sleeping with lots of women who aren’t your wife. That’s between you and her, except randy CEOs of public companies make good copy. You’ve also been charging Champagne and lingerie to your corporate credit card. That’s between you and your board of directors. Maybe you’ve been accurate on your expense reports about those charges and nobody cares.”

The hand holding the papers dropped a few inches. Some of the authoritarian veneer fell away. The mood pendulum in the room swung in my direction.

“I don’t give a damn about any of it,” I continued, “except for the leverage it provides. We haven’t been properly introduced, but the one thing you should know is that I was trained by the KGB. We’re very good at using leverage.” I smiled to show it was nothing personal. “Answer my questions, and I’ll leave. Lie, prevaricate, stonewall, and you’ll have many more people asking much more difficult questions by this time tomorrow.”

“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” His voice indicated I’d succeeded in moving up the food chain—from irritant to menace.

“I’m doing a job for your brother-in-law, Sebastian Leitz. That’s all you need to know about me—except that those corporate card charges, they’re only the beginning of what I know about you. You invest in your brother-in-law’s hedge funds?”

“What? Yes. But what the hell…?”

“Then why’d you help bug his computers?”

I was all but certain he hadn’t—he didn’t match the cleaners’ description—but I wanted him on edge when he answered.

“WHAT? What are you talking about? Sebastian? Bugged computers. I have no idea…”

“Okay,” I said calmly. “Sit down. Let’s have a rational conversation.”

He took the chair behind his desk. I sat opposite and made a point of shifting my body, crossing my legs, getting comfortable. The control pendulum kept shifting.

“Leitz’s computers are the reason I’m here. Somebody bugged them, like I said. The same somebody’s had a team of fake lawyers making the rounds of the family. They visited your wife. They come here? Elizabeth Rogers is the name I have. The firm is called Lindley & Hill.”

“Never heard of her or the firm.”

“Ask your secretary if this is another meeting you turned down.”

He started to respond, thought better, and picked up the phone.

She had no memory of Lindley & Hill either. That was interesting. I would have given long odds on Stern receiving a visit.

“It’s not my business,” I said, “but your wife was in bad shape when I left her this morning. She’d put away half a bottle before lunchtime.”

“I suppose you blame that on me.”

“I’m not assigning blame,” I said untruthfully as I got prepared to be thrown out. “I’m telling you what I saw.”

He stood and returned to the window. He had a view westward across Midtown and north to the Upper East Side.

“You’re right,” he said turning back to face me, “about not your business. But I don’t need any more enemies out there than I already have. I can’t get Sebastian or anyone else in the lunatic asylum they call a family to listen. You seem to care—you brought up Marianna and her drinking. Maybe they’ll listen to you.”

I should have kept my mouth shut and left. I’d already learned what I could.

“I’m not going to explain or apologize,” he said. “The credit card charges were stupid, I’ll admit that. And I’ll reimburse the company for all of them. But the women…

“My marriage has been an empty shell for years. Not my doing. I worked hard to get Marianna to look at the cause, to get help, to hold things together—if only for the kids’ sake. I got no goddamned help from her family. When all that failed, I tried to bring it to some kind of rational end. I failed at that too. So, yes, in the last couple of years, I have sought… call it what you want—solace, companionship, just plain sex—I don’t care. I’m not proud, I’m not particularly sorry either.”

There are at least two sides to every story—it always pays to remember that. The truth usually lies somewhere in between. It can be difficult to pin down the exact point on the continuum, and often it doesn’t matter. This time, something kicked my curiosity into gear.

“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew. It wasn’t an all-of-a-sudden thing. I was probably slow to realize we had a problem. I was traveling even more in those days, trying to get the company off the ground. Strictly solo, by the way.”

I nodded. He was being truthful, I believed him.

“Anyway, it finally dawned on me that we were growing apart—all of us, Marianna, me, the boys—and about the same time that we were spending a lot of money on booze. I cut back on my schedule, spent more time at home. That just seemed to make it worse—put Marianna on edge. She was drinking more than was good for her. I tried to talk about it. She wouldn’t listen. She didn’t want to face it. I tried to get Sebastian and the others to help. He made an attempt at least, but she kept him at arm’s length. She’s good at that. The others? To be honest, they were no help at all.”

“How long ago was this?”

He looked out the window for a moment.

“Two years, give or take—when I woke up to something happening, I mean. If I’m honest, I’d say the drift started two years before that.”

Right about the time Daria Leitz shot herself.

He said, “It was two years ago when I made my big mistake. I was in Chicago, it had been a bad day, a bad trip, I got to talking to a pretty woman at the hotel, we had dinner, one thing led to another and… I saw her a few more times, and she assumed things were more serious than they were. When I tried to explain, she threatened to call my wife. She knew her name and number—she’d done her research. I didn’t believe she’d follow through, but I was wrong. Marianna flew off the handle. We had a horrendous fight, I kept telling her to quiet down, but she just kept screaming. No way the kids didn’t hear. That’s when I decided it was over. I was wrong about that too. You know that expression, ‘Takes two to tango’?”

I nodded.

“Also takes two to break up. She refuses to discuss it. But every time I show up in Bedford, she berates me with language no one should have to listen to. Certainly not children. So I’ve taken to staying in the city. I can’t go forward, can’t go back. I’m at my wits’ end, I don’t mind telling you.”

“That why you cut off the money?”

“She told you that?”

I shook my head.

“Then how…?”

“I told you, I know lots of things.”

“I don’t want to hurt her. But it’s the only way I can think of to get her to face reality.”

The reality I’d witnessed was downgrading from Rémy to Presidente.

“Tell me one thing,” I said. “These so-called lawyers who went to see your wife—if they asked her to help with Leitz’s computers, if they offered her money, do you think she’d go along—in her current state, I mean?”

He came back to the desk and sat down, head in hands. When he raised his eyes, I could see the emotional exhaustion they held. That’s tough to fake. He’d been telling his story straight.

“I wish… I wish I could say no, no way. But these days, to be honest, I have no goddamned idea.”

It was 2:30 P.M. when I put the Potemkin back in the garage. I stopped at a gourmet deli a block from the office and bought a designer smoked salmon sandwich. They were pushing a new brand of gelato, one of whose flavors was tiramisu, so I took a small container of that too. Upstairs, I put a spoonful in Pig Pen’s bowl.

“Try this. Frozen tiramisu.”

Pig Pen took a long, skeptical look before sticking his beak into the bowl.

“No tiramisu,” he announced.

“It’s gelato,” I said. “Tiramisu flavor.”

“No tiramisu. Gigolo.”

“Not gigolo. Gelato. Italian ice cream.”

“Gigolo. Russky bull.” He retreated to the backmost perch, where he goes when he’s pissed off, and gave me his hostile, one-eyed stare.

Foos was in his office, the last bites of a cheeseburger and fries on his desk. My designer salmon seemed less appetizing.

“I bought Pig Pen some gelato. He thinks I tried to trick him with Russian tiramisu.”

“Pig Pen has a very discerning palate.”

I doubt parrots have palates, but there was no point arguing. I opened my sandwich. Foos eyed it with bemusement. “Diet?”

“You are what you eat.”

“Personally, I never aspired to be a fish.”

“I spent the morning with Marianna Stern, Jenny Leitz, and Jonathan Stern. That family’s got nothing but trouble.”

“What did Jenny have to say?”

“She told me about the ALS.”

“Life’s not fair. She’s way too nice a person for that.”

“Agree. You didn’t think it worth mentioning?”

“She asked me not to talk about it.”

And that, of course, for Foos, was the end of it.

“What do you know about Marianna and Stern?”

“Not much. Only met them once or twice.”

“Their marriage is all washed up, she’s a lush and won’t consider divorce, he’s chasing other women.”

“Shit happens.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Nope.”

“You are aware that Andras is a computer whiz?”

“Kid’s pretty swift. I wrote him a couple of college recommendations.”

“You didn’t think that worth mentioning?”

“He’s Leitz’s son.”

“You’re the one who pointed out that the strange computer activity corresponded with school vacations.”

“Never thought about it that way.”

Mathematicians and psychology. There’s just a disconnect.

“You know anything about a woman named Alyona Lishina?”

“She’s a knockout.”

Knockouts were something he had experience with. “You’ve met her?”

“Sure. She’s Russian. Temperamental.”

“You suggesting cause and effect?”

“Got a mirror?”

“I don’t know who’s less forthcoming, you or Leitz. Are they…?”

“Just friends, so far as I know.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“I told you before, don’t believe everything you read in—”

“I didn’t read this. Aleksei told me.”

He shrugged. “Russian rumor, still a rumor.”

True enough, and if this rumor had any kind of traction I would have read about it on Ibansk.com—it’s the kind of insider tidbit Ivanov makes a living on.

“Here’s some fact.” I told him about Andras’s multimillion-dollar bank account.

“Huh. I wonder if…” He clattered away at his keyboard. “Looks like you’re on to something. That strange activity originated at Leitz’s house. He’s got the home system networked through the firm’s.”

“What’s the kid up to?”

“Can’t tell. Hard to avoid concluding that he’s ripping someone off, though. Question is, who and why?”

“There’s more. His girlfriend’s in it with him. She’s got the same bank accounts and deposit patterns. Her name’s Irina Lishina—Alyona’s daughter.”

“You’re full of surprises.”

“So’s your pal Leitz. What do we know about the Baltic Enterprise Commission?”

“Bad-ass mofos. Web hosting for hire, if your business is spamming, phishing, or kiddie porn. Premium service, pretty much bulletproof. Everybody thinks they were behind the denial of service attacks on Estonia and Georgia a few years back, working for your former colleagues in the Kremlin. Word is, they’ve been experiencing a few glitches, but there’s been no noticeable decline in spamming, phishing, or kiddie porn. Lowlife online thrives as always. Why?”

“Aleksei thinks the same thing. Says the guy who beat me up on Second Avenue last week is the BEC’s chief enforcer.”

“He sure about that?”

“That’s what he says.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked across the desk at me. I had his full attention now.

“They the ones targeting Leitz?”

“Could be. Let me show you something.”

I walked around the desk, brought up a Web browser on his computer, logged onto Ibansk.com, and scrolled to the photo of Konychev.

“That’s the man behind the BEC. Check out the background.”

Foos stared at the screen for a moment, and said, “Huh. See what you mean.”

“His sister is Alyona Lishina.”

“I’m finished being surprised. You gonna tell Leitz?”

“I’m betting he already knows about Alyona. Andras, I’m not sure. I’d like more information about what the kid is up to first—and whether and how it ties in with his old man’s office being bugged. Let’s check out that law firm.”

Foos worked the Lindley & Hill Web site while I called Elizabeth Rogers. Halfway through the second ring, there was the slightest pause and click as the call was transferred from the 212 area code to somewhere else—out of state, probably out of country. Another ring and a female voice answered.

“Lindley & Hill.” No discernible accent.

“Elizabeth Rogers, please.”

“I’m sorry, she’s out of the office. Would you like her voicemail?”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Does she have an assistant?”

“One moment, please.”

The voice came back in ten seconds and announced the assistant was away from her desk. Whoever set this up had covered the bases. I asked for voicemail and listened to another accentless voice announcing herself as Elizabeth Rogers and asking me to leave a message. No point in that. Elizabeth Rogers didn’t exist.

Neither did Lindley & Hill. Foos said, “That Web site’s no more in New York than I’m in Alaska.”

“Can you tell where it is?”

“Locator bug reports Eastern Europe.”

“Will they know someone was asking?”

“Did we suddenly enter amateur hour?”

Nosferatu or his boss or someone was going to a lot of trouble. I thought about that and the fact that so far, all the Leitz family had succeeded in doing was heaping their problems on top of my own. I was looking forward to meeting Julia.

The phone rang. Foos answered, listened a moment, rolled his eyes and put the caller on hold.

“You ain’t heard nothing yet,” he said, handing me the receiver. “Thomas Leitz. If this guy ain’t light in his loafers, Pig Pen’s a bald eagle.”

I released the HOLD button and introduced myself.

“Big Brother Sebastian says I’m supposed to talk to you, and I always do what Sebastian says.”

Unlike Foos, I try not to jump to stereotypical conclusions, but Thomas Leitz had the same high, tense voice I’d heard on his message machine, with the addition of a pronounced lisp. Foos arched an eyebrow across the desk. I turned away.

“Thank you for returning my call. I’d prefer to talk face to face, if that’s all right with you. I can meet at your convenience.”

A long pause, as if Thomas Leitz wanted to convey that no meeting would be convenient.

I waited.

Finally, he said, “I teach at P.S. One-forty-six, all the way east on Houston, by the Drive. We’re having a conference here tomorrow morning. I’ll meet you outside when it’s over. Say noon, if you don’t mind working Saturday.”

He said the last part with a sneer, as if he clearly did mind.

“I’ll be there. How will I know you?”

“You can’t miss me. I’m the one who looks like a screaming queen.”

CHAPTER 14

Still plenty of time before I was due in Midtown, so I walked north past City Hall and through Chinatown and Little Italy into eastern SoHo. The overcast sky darkened and a chill wind came up, but it wasn’t unpleasant. As I walked, I called a Wall Street Journal reporter I know. He and I were both working on an insider trading scam a few years ago, each for his own reasons. We were able to help each other out, so we continue to take each other’s calls.

“Julia Leitz,” I said, once I’d established he wasn’t staring down the barrel of a deadline.

“Jesus. You hiring a PR firm?”

“Just going to talk to her. Family matter. Hers.”

“You shouldn’t ask a reporter about flacks. We hate ’em. Half the time they’re trying to keep us from the story, the other half they’re wasting our time with stories that aren’t stories. Even when they’re helpful, we can’t bring ourselves to admit it.”

“So you know her?”

“Sure. There’re a handful who’re pretty damned good at what they do, as much as we hate to say so. She’s one. Smart, tough, opinionated. Her approach is all or nothing, takes no prisoners. She works on big corporate deals—mergers, acquisitions, restructurings. Every transaction is either going to remake the entire landscape of corporate America or end capitalism as we know it, depending on which side is paying her. She charges a fortune—six, seven, eight hundred bucks an hour. Like a big-time lawyer. That’s another reason we can’t stand flacks—jealousy.” He laughed.

“Anything I should watch out for?”

“Get ready for a fight if you disagree. And she and truth—I’d say they’re more acquaintances than friends.”

I was a block from the Bleecker Street subway station when I passed Ballato’s, a timeless old-school Italian restaurant. I was still running early, and the smoked salmon sandwich had ceased to satisfy, so I enjoyed a plate of fried calamari and a fortifying vodka before resuming my journey uptown to meet one of capitalism’s soldiers of fortune.

Third Avenue was busy at the end of the workday. Traffic crawled between the lights. Lines queued for the commuter buses to the Bronx and Queens. People walked quickly, hurrying home to their families, eager to get out of the cold. I didn’t feel part of it. My workday wasn’t over and I had no one to go home to. I’d held myself to a single drink at Ballato’s. Maybe, if I was lucky, one of Julia Leitz’s all-important deals would blow, she’d stand me up, and I could retreat to another saloon.

Something had been tugging at me in the empty restaurant, something I was overlooking, but I couldn’t grab hold of it. Perhaps only that a day spent with a crushed Marianna Leitz, a terminally ill Jenny, and a hamstrung Stern left me unsettled. Never mind Andras’s and Irina’s bank accounts. I was delving into all kinds of problems that weren’t mine and couldn’t do a damned thing about. Except make them worse if I discovered one of the Leitzes had conspired to undercut their brother. Julia Leitz didn’t promise to break the mold.

It had taken a minute to peg the guy following me when I came out of Ballato’s. I’d all but forgotten about the gray Camry until I crossed Houston and saw a balding man sitting in the big window of a pool hall on the far side, looking out. He held a folded tan overcoat in his lap. He probably thought the dim light of the billiard parlor provided the perfect cover. He hadn’t counted on the streetlight directly above his head. I couldn’t be sure he was the same guy who’d been in Bedford, but I wasn’t about to bet against it. His face and clothes said he was American. Nothing about him, starting with competence, said he was working for Nosferatu. Still, he had to be working for someone.

I kept walking, down the stairs of the Bleecker Street station. He followed a minute later. When the train came, I got on, and he did as well, the car behind mine. At Fourteenth Street, I waited until the doors started to close and hopped off. He wasn’t fast enough. I was tempted to wave as he passed. I climbed back to the street and caught a cab uptown. I’m not sure why I bothered—except old habits die hard.

Julia Leitz’s building was one of dozens of similar Third Avenue structures, mediocre, knockoff international-style skyscrapers, all equally forgettable. I didn’t bother to look for Tan Coat. He would know my destination or not. I showed my driver’s license to the lobby guard and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Maroon letters announced THE LEITZ GROUP in flowing script. The receptionist had gone home, but a harried-looking young man answered when I buzzed and led me through the halls and cubicle clusters to a corner office with two secretaries’ desks outside. The place was still busy with the sounds of keyboards, phones, TVs, printers, and voices. The staff was young—twenties and thirties. Unlike her brother’s shop, these kids were fully dressed, some even wore skirts and ties. Most had the same harassed look as the man who’d let me in.

I waited at a respectful distance while the kid stuck his head in his boss’s door. He recoiled as Julia Leitz’s twang blew out. They could have heard her back in Queens.

“SHIT! I DON’T HAVE FUCKING TIME FOR THIS. WE’RE ALREADY GOING ALL FUCKING NIGHT. I TOLD HIM TO CALL. WHY DIDN’T HE FUCKING CALL, GODDAMMIT? WHY DIDN’T HE CALL?”

I stepped around the young man into the office. He shouldn’t have to answer for my sins.

“He didn’t call because he forgot,” I said quietly. “He apologizes. No harm done, at least not to him. If this is not a good time, he can come back later—or perhaps tomorrow. I’ll tell your brother you were busy.”

Julia Leitz sat behind a table-desk strewn with papers. A flat screen held down one corner, three more behind her head. The furniture, prints, carpeting, and curtains were all decorator neutral, without personality, conveying nothing. The woman behind the desk was plump, but not overly so, and dressed in a white blouse open at the neck. She was neither attractive nor not. Bags under her eyes indicated she lived the lifestyle she espoused. She took a big swallow from a glass next to a Diet Pepsi can. I don’t know whether the mention of her brother changed her mood or temperamental outbursts ran in the family, but she seemed to cool as I stood there.

“That’s okay,” she said, standing. “It’s been a long day. Going to be a long night. Sit down. Later won’t be any better.”

She came around her desk and took an upholstered chair. She wore a black skirt beneath the white blouse and black shoes without heels. I sat in a matching chair across a glass coffee table.

“I won’t waste your time,” I said. “I’m here on your brother’s behalf. I want to know about some people—perhaps a man and woman, stating they were lawyers—who might have come to see you a few weeks ago.”

“Who else have you spoken with?” Her tone was aggressive, she was on the attack. For no reason that I could see.

“Your sister and brother-in-law. And Jenny. I’m seeing Thomas tomorrow.”

“Don’t believe anything they tell you.”

One more manifestation of Leitz family closeness. Remembering my reporter-friend’s admonition, I passed on the opportunity to disagree. But I did ask, “Why not?”

“Thomas hates me. Hates Sebastian too. He’s jealous. Always has been. He doesn’t make a dime, and he spends like a drunken sailor. Probably spends on drunken sailors. Anyone who’s successful, anyone with a real job, who does something important, we’re a target.” She leaned back and crossed her arms, resting her case.

I wanted to ask if she believed teaching was unimportant, but I said, “And Marianna?”

She waved a hand dismissively. “You’ve seen her, you know.”

Sympathy, it appeared, was something else Julia Leitz was only distantly acquainted with.

“You did get a visit? A man and a woman? Lawyers?”

“Yes. About a month ago. I’ve got a card here somewhere.” She went to her desk and dove into the papers.

“SHEILA! HERE NOW!”

A thirty-something woman appeared at the door.

Julia said, “Those lawyers that came here last month, right in the middle of the Asco deal, remember? No notice. Not anything we were working on, something about Sebastian…”

“I remember.”

“They left a card.”

“Got it,” the woman said.

She disappeared and came back thirty seconds later. She handed a card to Julia who passed it over to me. Same one I’d received from Marianna.

“Need anything else?” Julia said. “I’ve got calls…”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Just a few minutes. Can you describe them?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did they look like? What did they say?”

“Oh. Ordinary. Lawyers. They asked questions about Sebastian. Some kind of background check. Related to the network deal. I told them what they wanted to know. I was in a hurry. Asco was a huge transaction, biggest merger ever in the human resources software space. A game-changer, but not a marquee business, hard to get attention. We landed the front page of the Journal.”

She leaned back once more, basking.

Marianna, drunk, emotionally devastated, tells them nothing. Julia, one could argue the more sophisticated, at least professionally, pays no attention, buys the cover story because they look the part, they’re familiar in her world, and spills the beans—to the extent she had beans to spill.

“What was that—what they wanted to know?”

“Is this really important? They were checking him out. He’s trying to buy two TV networks. No one’s ever done that before. Due diligence is part of the process. Just came at an inconvenient time, like I said.”

“What did they want to know?” I pressed, trying to break through her need to bring everything back to herself.

“They asked questions about our family, our parents, where we came from, that kind of thing.”

“They ask about the layout of your brother’s trading floor?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t think so. Why?”

“It didn’t occur to you, this was all information they could’ve gotten elsewhere—or why they needed to know?”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m trying to get a fix on these people. I’m not sure they were who they claimed to be.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN? DO YOU THINK I’M NAÏVE?”

“I’m just asking questions.”

“The law firm was legit. I checked the Web site. Called the office.”

“Talk to anyone?”

Pause. Realization dawning. “Yes.”

“A receptionist and a recording?”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SUGGESTING?”

“You were conned, I’m afraid.”

“BULLSHIT. I checked the Web site. Here.” She went to her desk, typed on the keyboard, and swiveled the flat screen toward me. “Look.”

“It’s a Web site, all right, hosted somewhere in Eastern Europe.”

“HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

“I get paid to know. You describe your brother’s office to them?”

“NO! I told you. Why would I do that?”

“Because they asked.”

Her face turned bright red. The decibels jumped. “GET OUT! I’m calling Sebastian right now.”

“Call ahead.”

I sat still while she played the bluff as long as she could, all the way through ten digits of the phone number, before she replaced the receiver. She moved papers around the desk, struggling to keep her temper under control. I’d stepped over the line, a couple of lines—I probably shouldn’t have stopped for the vodka—but I didn’t care. Three head cases and a death sentence in one day was too much.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Have you lent your brother Thomas money?”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“He spends like a drunken sailor. Your words, not mine. Have you lent him any money?”

“No.”

“How about your husband? Would he?”

“No, of course not.”

“Would you know?”

“YES, GODDAMMIT, OF COURSE I WOULD KNOW. WHY WOULDN’T I KNOW?”

She shoved more papers. She looked at all four flat screens and clicked her computer mouse. “I’ve got eighty-five new e-mails…”

Once again, the subject of Walter Coryell hit a nervous nerve. This time, with his wife. It might have been her confrontational attitude, it might have been because she was married to the guy, but this time I didn’t back off.

“Did the people who came to see you talk to your husband?”

She stopped shoving papers and thought for a moment. The first time she’d taken time to think since I arrived. “Walter’s very busy. He’s got his own company—highly successful. He’s out of town right now. He travels a lot on business.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Is this really important?”

“Why didn’t you attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you and your husband attend your brother’s wedding?”

“What’s that have to do with this?”

“Just a question.”

“I have work to do.” She grabbed her computer mouse and shoved it across the desk. The phone rang.

“That’s your conference call,” Sheila said through the door.

Julia Leitz reached for the phone and stopped and looked at me. I waited while it rang.

“I have to take this call.”

“Saved by the bell.”

“What the hell does that mean? I have to take this call.”

I stood. “I’m sure the whole damned deal depends on it.”

Third Avenue was quieter now. The cold air felt good. I was annoyed with myself. Julia Leitz got under my skin. The whole family pissed me off. I felt sympathy for Jonathan Stern, not necessarily a sympathetic guy. How did levelheaded, smiling Jenny Leitz put up with this lot? How would she manage when her illness really took hold? I would have locked them all in a single Lubyanka cell and thrown away the key.

I looked around for Tan Coat, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he hadn’t guessed my destination—or was learning better technique. I flipped a mental coin. Heads—find a quiet tavern. Tails—skip the tavern, go home, eat a Spartan dinner, and go to bed. Plenty to look into in the morning. In my mind’s eye, the coin landed on the sidewalk, rolled along a crease in the concrete and disappeared into a sewer drain. On par with the rest of the day.

Bar and dinner could wait. I walked to Grand Central, rode the Lexington Avenue Express between Fourteenth and Fifty-ninth Streets a few times to give Tan Coat a chance to show himself. When he didn’t, I switched at Fifty-ninth to the N to Queens. The first stop across the river put me at Queensboro Plaza. I walked a few minutes to the block of Twenty-second Street between Fortieth and Forty-first avenues, the headquarters of YouGoHere.com, Walter Coryell’s company.

CHAPTER 15

An empty commercial block in an empty commercial neighborhood. Five-story brick and concrete buildings on one side held warehouses, electricians, cabinet makers, a lighting manufacturer, and more than a few empty spaces for rent. The single- and double-height structures opposite were home to an auto repair shop, a refrigeration company, a metal fabricator, and one small apartment conversion, if the satellite TV dishes outside three of six windows were any indication. No delis, restaurants, or bars, unless you counted the “gentlemen’s club” near the subway offering the opportunity of meet one of Tiger Woods’s mistresses up close and personal. Hardly a service industry neighborhood. Definitely not a successful dot-com neighborhood.

Number 40-28 stood midblock and won the contest for most peeling paint and FOR RENT signs. Roman numerals on the concrete cornice broadcast the date of construction as MDCCCVII—a few years after the classical era. The door was steel with a small, reinforced glass window. Empty tiled vestibule behind. An intercom by the door had a dozen buzzers with yellowed signs. The only one ending in “.com” was YOUGOHERE. I pushed it and got no response. I pushed again with the same result. The elevator at the far end of the vestibule opened, and a middle-aged black guy with a graying mustache pushed open the front door.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m looking for the guy at YouGoHere, supposed to meet him at seven thirty.” I guessed at the time.

“Good luck to you, man. Ain’t never seen that dude. Go on up and take a look, that’s what you want.”

I thanked him as he walked into the night.

A slow elevator with a worn-out cab deposited me on the third floor at the head of a short cinderblock corridor with four steel doors. Three had signs. None said YouGoHere. The unlabeled door was sandwiched between the elevator and a space labeled GROARK CUSTOM FRAMERS. I knocked. No answer. I tried the other three with the same result. My watch said 7:55. The hell with it.

Back downstairs, I crossed the street to see if there were lights in any of the windows. None. A wasted trip, but hadn’t I expected that?

I remembered a first-rate Italian restaurant, another old-style New York institution, a half-dozen blocks away. I’d been taken there a few years before and thought more than once about returning. The tug of a vodka martini and a good Bolognese sauce was setting up another mental coin toss when headlights turned into the block. Instinct pushed me into a dark doorway. The lights swept the parked cars, and motion caught my eye—a head ducking, a moment too late, behind the windshield of a Chevy sedan. Could have been a trick of the lights, but I stepped farther back into the darkness. No way Tan Coat could have followed me here—and certainly not in a car. A black Cadillac Escalade rolled to a stop outside number 12. The driver kept the engine running. Nobody got out. I didn’t move.

Five minutes passed. Then another five.

My muscles started to ache mildly, but waiting is an acquired skill, one I’d learned, along with every other Russian, as a kid. No more movement from the car down the block.

A flash of fire in the SUV as the driver struck a match. The flame illuminated a blood-drained face as it lit a cigarette held by misshapen teeth.

The spectral driver drawing on the smoke was Nosferatu.

The music was coming from my apartment. Only two to the floor, one at each end of the hall, the elevator in the middle. My door was ajar. Loretta Lynn, I was pretty sure, backed by steel guitar, bass and drums, floated in my direction. She was singing about being true to her man while he’s gone—if he doesn’t overdo it. I like Loretta—but I don’t own any of her records. No question, though, she was on my stereo. My first thought was that I’d been followed, but Loretta didn’t seem Nosferatu’s style.

Almost ten o’clock. Nosferatu had smoked his cigarette, then two more. He’d made two calls on his cell phone. I didn’t move a muscle the entire time. No one else came down the block, vehicle or pedestrian. The guy in the other car, if there was a guy in the other car, stayed out of sight. After the third smoke, Nosferatu climbed out and went into the building using a key to open the front door. I watched the windows on the third floor. No light came on. Coryell could have drawn curtains or shades. Nosferatu could be doing his work in the dark. He could be visiting someone else altogether. Still no movement at the car down the block. Ever so slowly, I got out my phone and tapped Coryell’s number, not sure what I’d say if anyone answered. No one did. After a handful of rings I got a recording.

Nosferatu was inside exactly twenty-four minutes. When he came out, he walked up and down the block, ten yards in each direction. He stopped about five short of the car where I’d seen movement. Once again, I didn’t move a millimeter. Neither did the guy in the Chevy. If he saw either of us, there was nowhere to run. After two minutes that stretched through half the night, Nosferatu got back in his SUV. He smoked another cigarette, made another call, started his engine and drove off. I waited another fifteen minutes before I started breathing normally.

I took a chance and walked to the other end of the block before turning left and back to Queensboro Plaza. A calculated gamble—I had little to lose. If there was a guy in the car, he’d already spotted me going in and out of Coryell’s building. If he was Nosferatu’s man, I wouldn’t be walking around. If it was Tan Coat, he already knew what I looked like. Sure enough, a man in a Chevy Malibu tried hard to look invisible as I strolled past. Definitely not Tan Coat—this guy wore a suit and had a full head of hair. Lots of people appeared to be interested in YouGoHere and Walter Coryell. Forty minutes later, as I got off my elevator, I was still thinking about that. But my immediate concern was who was in my apartment. Nosferatu hadn’t spotted me, I was almost certain of that. But what was this?

A pause on the CD and a new song started, Loretta singing about a honky-tonk girl crying out her lonely heart. My heart did a back flip and landed in my throat. I got my breathing under control for the second time in an hour, walked down the hall, and pushed open the door.

Victoria sat on my couch, glass in hand, looking drop-dead gorgeous and staring straight at me.

“Goddamned Russians. It’s about time you got home. I’ve been here since seven, and I’m hot and hungry—or I was when I arrived. When the hell are you going to learn to keep some wine in the house?”

CHAPTER 16

We didn’t get any dinner. Not much sleep either. But when I awoke at my usual 6:00 A.M., her head on my chest, my arm around her shoulders, her leg across mine, all was right with the world.

I had a thousand questions, of course. She hadn’t let me ask one. We went straight to bed and rediscovered each other slowly until heat and passion took over, and we thrashed across the sheets like two teenagers who have just figured it all out. When we came up for air, she still wouldn’t let me say a word. The second time was slow, contained passion until the very end, when we both exploded and collapsed in a single mass of sweat and flesh. Just like the first time—even better. Before I fell asleep I told myself this time I’d resort to padlocks and handcuffs before I let her leave again.

She seemed to read my mind.

“Don’t worry. I’m not making the same mistake twice,” were her only other words that night.

I believed her, but I also thought it would be just my Russian luck to go for my morning run and come back to an empty apartment. I couldn’t move without waking her, which I didn’t want to do—truth be told, I didn’t want to move at all—so I lay there, dozing, thinking about what had brought her back and trying not to let the ghostly image of Nosferatu, smoking his cigarettes, intrude on an otherwise perfect morning.

“Don’t you go running or jumping or pumping at an ungodly hour of the morning?” she said, smiling at me, her eyes as big and green and deep as the Nile.

“Pumping perhaps. And I’m not leaving,” I said.

“Jesus. I’d almost forgotten the humor. You don’t need to worry. I told you that last night.”

“You are a woman of your word.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it says. You told me you’d leave before, without so much as a kiss good-bye, and that’s exactly what you did. I’m staying put.”

She laughed. “You’re right. I did. But not this time.”

“What changed?”

“Not you, I’m willing to bet.”

“Guilty. But I can try.”

“Uh-huh. We both know how good you are at that. We can discuss it. We can discuss lots of things, which I’m looking forward to, but first, I’m ravenous. I never did get dinner. I couldn’t find anything worth eating in your fridge last night, and believe me, I looked. Get out there and hunt or forage or whatever men do, besides pump. I want a real breakfast. Bacon, eggs with Tabasco, remember? Move it!”

She rolled out of my grasp with a playful slap and skipped to the bathroom. She flicked her beautiful behind for my benefit before she closed the door.

I lay there another minute holding on to the image of a present-day Aphrodite frolicking across my bedroom. Victoria de Millenuits, Victoria of a Thousand Nights, was ten years younger and two inches shorter than I am. She had a figure that would make Sophia Loren take a second look and turn green when she did. Long, thick black hair, those Nile-deep green eyes, a big laugh, and a Bardot pout when she was unhappy. She had brains to match her looks and a temper that trumped both. She also had that highly successful legal career, most recently occupying perhaps the top prosecutorial position in the entire country. And a firearm permit. The first time I met her she threatened to have me deported.

What she hadn’t had was luck with men, a run I perpetuated when I came close to breaking her heart—after promising twice that I wouldn’t put myself, or her, in that position. Compounding matters, I couldn’t even provide a good explanation of what had happened without putting Aleksei’s life at risk, and I couldn’t explain that either. That’s when she left.

Something had brought her back, she’d tell me the story in her own time, but it sure looked like love. I was going to keep my promise this time, I told myself again, knowing as I did so, I was being untrue to her and to me. Fate has a way of letting you know when you’re making commitments you can’t keep.

The hell with fate. Love was stronger than that. I’d fucked up once. I wasn’t going to do it again.

She’d just come out of the shower—Aphrodite, like Sophia, would have been green too—when I joined her in the bathroom.

“Yikes,” she said when she saw my bruises. “I didn’t notice those last night. You look worse than last summer. What happened this time?”

“Someone wanted to send a message, and he selected me as the messenger. They look worse than they feel—now.”

“You go looking for trouble or does it just find you?”

“I wasn’t looking to get beat up.”

“But I’ll bet you did something that attracted the beater’s attention.”

“Indirectly.”

“See what I mean? What was it this time?”

“It’s Foos’s fault. He asked me to help out a friend.” I reached for her towel, but she slapped away my hand.

“And the friend beat you up?”

“Nosferatu beat me up. He’s a six-foot-seven Belarusian with buckteeth, named after a German vampire. The friend tried to crush my legs under his granite conference table.”

“You’re teasing me, and you’d better stop.” Her temper was still in place—the Bayou twang, I’d learned, was its early warning system. I held up my hands, palms facing her.

“All true. I swear.”

“Christ. You need someone to take care of you.”

“I’m taking applications.” I made another try for the towel. She slapped me away, with a smile.

“Breakfast, remember?”

“There are all kinds of hunger.”

I pulled at the towel once more. This time she let it fall away as she came into my arms. She was damp and warm all over and hot and wet where it counted. She gave a little cry and sank teeth into my shoulder as I lifted her behind and planted her against the wall to find my way inside. The cry melted to moan.

“Make me one promise,” she said.

Uh-oh. “I won’t lie to you again,” I said.

“You don’t have to lie. Just tell me you won’t let me leave, like you did last time.”

I laughed and said, “That’s the easiest promise I can make.”

“You’ve got me right where you want me—in every possible way. Take me like you mean it.”

We ate a long, large, leisurely meal, desire sated for the moment, each of us unsure how to start the conversation we both wanted to have. The departure—breakup—six months before had been abrupt. She’d walked out of my apartment, willing me to do something, anything to try to stop her—and I hadn’t moved a muscle. I’d wanted to, I’d been desperate, every part of my body was trying. I do learn from my mistakes. Some wise person once said you get to make three or four big decisions in life—try to get more than half of them right. I’d fucked up my first couple, paid the price for decades, and was still digging myself out of that hole with Aleksei. So as much as I’d wanted to stop her, I’d let her walk. To do otherwise was to send my son to his execution.

Now we were back at the very same kitchen counter, each of us wanting to explain our actions, tell the other how we felt, why we did what we did. We both knew there was no question of incrimination—bygones were already bygones. Forgiveness, to the extent any was necessary, had been granted in an instant last night. The need to explain is one of the most basic human desires. We all want to be loved—we also need to be understood. So the question at the moment, as we chewed bacon, scrambled eggs (with Tabasco), and English muffins, was how to get started.

I said, “Where did you go?”

“Several places. Home to Louisiana. Not much left there for me now, since my mom died. Then my sister in Miami. She’s got breast cancer. Double mastectomy. That’ll give you some perspective.”

“How is she?”

“They think they got it all. She’s doing okay, except her husband, who’s some kind of oceanic consultant, ran off with a hot Cuban babe from his firm. Apparently she’s something in a wet suit. Seems he’s been banging her for the last year, including the whole time my sister’s been sick. Men can be real bastards.”

I didn’t disagree. There was no point. Besides, she was right.

“Once Louisa went back to work, I went out to West Texas. Town called Marathon. Spent the last month there, thinking things over. I wanted solitude, and it’s pretty damned lonely.”

“Beautiful, though,” I said. “Gage Hotel?”

“Goddammit! How in the hell do you know everything I do? He told you, didn’t he? He and that computer serpent-thing…”

“Nobody told me anything. The Gage is the only hotel in Marathon. About the only thing in Marathon, period. You can cut the atmosphere with a knife. Great restaurant.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shit. Momma taught me lots of things. But she never said, ‘Don’t date a spy.’”

I told her the story of trying to outrun the Basilisk. I’d spent a week at the Gage, where they put a package of earplugs by your bed, as if they’re going to be any help against the mile-long freight trains that rumble through town at 3:00 A.M.—fifty yards from your room.

We traded notes about West Texas. Solitude and loneliness don’t begin to describe it. Neither do awe-inspiring or beauty. Her favorite spot was the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis, where from an altitude of almost seven thousand feet, you can see the stars and planets through high-powered telescopes with virtually no interference from ambient light on the ground. Mine is Donald Judd’s Mecca of minimalist art in Marfa, which he built on an old army base he’d bought from the government—where he’d been stationed as a teenager. Not unlike Muhammad’s epicenter, visiting requires a pilgrimage—the closest airport is El Paso, three and a half hours away. In a way I think Judd understood, it makes getting there half the fun.

Victoria had visited Chinati, as Judd called his desert creation, and not to my surprise, didn’t think much of it. “Art my ass. Concrete rectangles. Steel boxes. Neon lights. That’s not art.”

Minimalism is like my shaved head, people like it or they don’t. Victoria was forcefully in the latter camp on the art question. There’d be time enough to argue that later.

“I listened to a lot of Tom Russell while I was out there.”

“Now you’re talking. Bet he doesn’t have any more use for those antelope shacks than I do.”

Antelope shacks are what the locals, most of whom agree with Victoria, call the concrete structures Judd placed in a field alongside Route 67.

“What did you do, while I was away?” she said.

“Nothing much. Series of one-night stands.”

“What?! You son of a…!”

The right hand came flying across the counter. I resolved to take my punishment like a man and waited for the sting of the slap. She stopped before she got there.

“You really are a bastard.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Hard for a virile Russian male in the prime of virile Russian maleness to admit he’s been rendered feeble and helpless by a capitalist vixen.”

“Spare the socialist horseshit. Did you miss me?”

“I spent most of the time moping, you want to know the truth. Didn’t do much of anything. Foos can confirm that. He wouldn’t let me use the Basilisk to find you, which made it worse because I knew how easy it would be. I drank too much. That just made me think more about you. Tried to break out of it by going to Moscow. Saw Aleksei. First time I’ve spent with him since he was a baby.”

“How’d that go?”

“Not great, about as well as can be expected, I suppose. Not easy, starting again after almost thirty years. Worse than starting from scratch, really, because there’s the baggage. Why’d I leave? Why didn’t I let him know where I was? Why did I lie to his mother? Underlying all those questions, of course, is the unspoken premise—why were you only thinking of yourself? And why should I believe you’re any different now? Then there’s my career with the Cheka, not to mention the family connections, which are a huge issue for him. He’s borderline irrational on the subject, not that I blame him. Hard to get past how much damage we did—and the number of people we did it to. Also hard to explain when it all happened in another time, another place, another world really.”

“Even harder when you’re too scared to tell him the truth, right?”

I looked across, stunned. How the hell could she know about Beria?

“Hey, what’s wrong? What did I say?”

I could hear Lavrenty Pavlovich chuckling in the background. I waited for him to appear, but he stayed away. Then I realized she was talking about the story I’d told her of my upbringing—my birthplace, my mother’s death, the orphanage, being sent back to the Gulag. She was the first person I’d ever told—she had no reason to judge and condemn a zek, she barely knew what one was. She was assuming I’d be scared to tell Aleksei, terrified of what his reaction would be, as indeed I had been. Before a bigger terror reared his head. Beria chuckled again.

“Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine, but who’s the real bastard now?” I said.

“Hey! I didn’t mean it that way. I meant to say, I understand.”

“I know that,” I said gently. “Truth hurts, as someone once pointed out.”

It hurt even more if it involved Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. I wasn’t ready to tell Victoria—or anyone—about that.

“Does he blame you—for his mother?”

“He says he doesn’t and I believe him. But he needs time to process everything that happened. I’m glad I went but it was probably too soon to start rebuilding.”

“You going back?”

“Maybe in a month or two.” Or sooner, if I could figure a way to reestablish Sasha’s access to the Cheka archives.

The green eyes stared straight at me. Almost anyone would have asked again what happened that night at JFK. Aleksei had saved my life, but in the process, he’d dispatched Iakov Barsukov and his murdering henchman to reunite with Lenin, Stalin, and, certainly, Beria, south of the last terrestrial border. Since Iakov was second only to Putin in assuring the Cheka’s continuing ascension in post-Soviet Russia, Aleksei’s life expectancy would be measured in minutes the day the organization found out he was anywhere near the airport that night. I will never breathe a word, not even to her. She recognized that, and the fact that she didn’t ask made me think we really did have a chance.

She said, “Did you really spend all that time moping? Over me?”

“Like I said, ask Foos. He got me the job I’m working on because he was tired of my hanging around bothering him.”

“I believe you. Mostly, I believed you last night and in the bathroom this morning. But don’t think I won’t ask. Just to be sure.”

“Good to be trusted. They teach you this in law school?”

“I learned trust in reform school, remember?”

I did. She’d done time in a juvenile detention center as a teenager when she stole her stepfather’s car—her escape after he tried to rape her.

“Speaking of law school, you going back to work?”

“Never fully left. Telecommuted part time.”

“How’d you explain so much time away?” It can’t have been that simple telecommuting to a U.S. attorney position.

“Told them I had some female medical issues to deal with. You work mainly with men, nobody wants to ask too many questions. Then my sister had them for real, so I was covered. I’m looking forward to the office. We’ve got a big case building, that’s the other reason I’m back.”

“Not just me?”

“Sorry, shug. I love you, I think, and I love my job. Don’t ask the order.”

I was willing to accept whatever order she stated. We held hands across the counter.

She said, “Do you know why I left?”

“You said you would. You gave me fair warning. That’s one reason I didn’t try to stop you.”

“I wouldn’t bring that up—not a point in your favor.”

Honesty’s not always the best policy, I guess. “You told me if I fooled around with the law, you’d stop fooling around with me—or words to that effect. Your job and career were too important, and I had to respect that. I heard you loud and clear. It’s just… Fate is hard to explain.”

“Don’t give me that fate bs. You’re pigheaded and there’s an adage about old pigs and new tricks. But that’s not the reason—or the whole reason.”

She was watching me, waiting for the answer she seemed certain I knew. Except I didn’t. I’d taken her threat—or promise—at face value. When she followed through I blamed only myself—and fate.

She watched and waited another few moments before she shook her head. “Men are just too obtuse for words. I was scared to death you were going to get hurt—or worse. I still am. That kind of fear was new to me. I couldn’t live with it. So I ran away. There—I’ve said it.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I stroked the back of her fingers.

“What changed?”

“I spent most of the last month thinking. Every day, by the pool at the Gage Hotel. I’d go out there to read, swim, sleep, but mostly I just thought things over. I figured out two things. I love my job and I love you, like I said. I couldn’t telecommute forever, so, if I stayed away, I’d be unemployed, lonely, and still in love. That prospect didn’t have a lot to recommend it. If I came back, I could get back to the office, see you, and work on trying to overcome the fear. I was hoping against hope that maybe you’d help. Then I saw your recent set of bruises. So much for that idea.”

“I told you, I didn’t go looking for them.”

“But they found you. They’re always going to find you. I’m still not a hundred percent sure I can deal with that, but I’m going to give it my best try.”

“I couldn’t be happier. I mean that. I’ll try too. But…”

“But what?”

“I’ve still got to finish this job Foos got me into. And the guy who gave me the bruises is still out there. I saw him last night, in Queens, just before I came home. He’s circling around the Leitz family—that’s Foos’s friend.”

“And you can’t leave it alone, of course.”

“I told Leitz I’d help. He’s got more problems than maybe he knows. I’d be leaving him hanging. Foos too. And there’s the not insubstantial matter of my fee.”

“I told you before, only two things men care about—sex and money. How much fee?”

“Million dollars.”

I thought I could surprise her, and I did. “A million dollars?! You’re kidding, right?”

“No joke. Plus use of a painting, four months a year. A Malevich.”

“Who’s Malevich?”

“You’re not going to like him. Russian. The guy who got those Marfa steel boxes and neon lights rolling—fifty years earlier.”

“You’re right about not liking him.”

“The painting in question cost Leitz eighty million.”

“This guy owns a painting worth eighty million dollars?”

“One of many.”

“Jesus. Who is he?”

“Financial rocket scientist. Hedge fund manager.”

“And why is he willing to pay you a million dollars?”

“To find the guys who are trying to derail a big deal he’s put together, or that’s what he thinks. It’s worth sixty or seventy billion. My fee gets lost in the rounding.”

“Sixty or seventy billion?! Wait a minute—is that the TV deal? It’s been all over the papers.”

“That’s right.

“Well dammit, shug, what are we doing sitting here? Let’s get working.”

“I thought sex and money only got men’s attention.”

“Us country girls have a deep-rooted respect for cash.”

“What about the trouble? Nosferatu might be downstairs now, for all I know.”

“The guy who beat you up?”

I nodded.

“For a million bucks, I’ll take the chance. But…”

“Having second thoughts?”

“Not on your life. Just you go down first.”

CHAPTER 17

Nosferatu was nowhere to be seen, and we walked to the office hand in hand. A clear, cold day, with a whipping wind. Halfway there, Victoria shivered and I put my arm around her. She burrowed in close and stayed there until we reached the lobby.

Upstairs, the expanse of the Basilisk engendered a small intake of breath.

“Jesus. Is that all computers?”

“Yep. Servers.”

“How many are there?”

“Never counted. Twelve rows, maybe twenty-five racks to a row, ten servers to a rack. That’s…”

“Is this the Big Dick thing your partner in crime boasts about?”

“A small piece of it. Probably the only noninvasive piece out there.”

“It invaded me as I remember.”

“Sometimes the end justifies the means.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. So you really could’ve found me, if you’d tried.”

“In less time than it takes to fly to El Paso.”

“Shit. And it’s legal?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t think I’m not going to look into that.”

We emerged from the server farm. Pig Pen heard us coming. He looked Victoria up and down, as he does with all newcomers. I was afraid he was going to whistle, a trick his boss taught him, but instead he announced, “Bohemia Bombshell!”

“What did he say?” Victoria said, turning.

“Sounded like ‘Bohemia Bombshell.’ It’s a compliment, I think.”

Pig Pen used to greet female visitors, almost always Foos’s Eastern European models, with “Cutie! Hot Number!” Apparently he’d been expanding his vocabulary.

“He’s a parrot. What’s he know about Bohemia? Or bombshells?”

“African gray, to be precise. Don’t sell him short. He gets his vocabulary from his boss, the radio, and his own bird brain, in that order. I’m responsible for foreign languages. C’est vrai, Pig Pen?”

“Russky.”

“See what I mean?”

“Wait a minute! He can… converse?”

“Sure. Why not? He’s smart, and he thinks he’s human. Visitors always pique his curiosity.”

“I don’t believe this.”

Pig Pen was clutching the mesh in his office door. Victoria walked slowly in his direction.

“Bohemia Bombshell,” Pig Pen said.

“I’m from the Bayou, parrot. Can you say, ‘Bayou Bombshell’?”

He looked her up and down again. 1010 WINS played in the background.

“Guess you’re right about bird brain,” she said.

“He’ll figure it out if he wants to,” I said. “Foos says he’s up to almost three hundred words. He can provide a complete report on the morning traffic interspersed with commercial appeals for food. How’re the bridges and tunnels, Pig Pen?”

“Twenty minutes, Holland. Ten, Lincoln.”

“GWB?”

“Ten, upper. Five, lower.”

“See what I mean? East River crossings?”

“Usual backups.” He fixed on Victoria. “Tiramisu?”

“Tiramisu?”

“His latest infatuation. Used to be pizza. Victoria is an aficionado of Italian food, Pig Pen. I’d keep at it, if I were you. You might get lucky.”

He climbed up the mesh to eye level and stared straight at her. “Bayou Babe. Tiramisu?”

“Now you’re talking,” she laughed.

“Bayou Babe.”

“Where’d he get his name? Wait a minute. Let me guess.” She sniffed the stale marijuana smoke in the air. “Late drummer for the Grateful Dead?”

Foos’s boom box rumbled across the space. “Give the lady a cigar.”

“Bayou Babe. Cigar,” Pig Pen said.

“It’s rare that I’m happy to see a member of the prosecutorial profession return to the fray, but in your case, I make an exception,” Foos said.

“Owing, I believe, to our mutual friend here,” Victoria responded, “who I understand has been somewhat out of sorts.”

“Total flow-breaker. I kept telling him not to worry, but…” He shrugged.

“I also gather you and your cyber-serpent declined assistance.”

“As I told him, only a complete fool would take sides.”

“You got that much right.” She nodded at the server canyons. “He says that thing’s legal, but he’s a socialist. You’re probably a socialist too, but at least you’re an American. How about it?”

“It’s entirely legal, and that, Ms. Bayou Babe, is the whole problem, in a nutshell.”

He turned and retreated to his office. Victoria looked at me. “Is it me, or is he like this with everyone?”

“Pretty much everyone. He’s fanatical on the subject of privacy. You—or more accurately your employer, the U.S. government—is Public Enemy Number One, in his view.”

“I know. That foundation of his…”

“I’m on the board, remember? So’s Pig Pen.”

“Christ. Why am I not surprised?”

“The problem, Foos will be quick to tell you, is not the Basilisk. It can retrieve, sort, analyze, and match data faster and more efficiently than anything else, but it can only do that because the data got saved to be searched and analyzed in the first place. The real problem is the Big Dick—and all the information it collects and keeps on you and me and everyone else—all in the name of marketing, public safety, antiterrorism or whatever other excuse the Dickers come up with.”

“Now wait just a minute. Who are you to talk? You used to do much worse. Your government spied on everybody.”

“True enough. My bosses would have killed for this kind of capability. That’s why I’m on STOP’s board—I’ve been where this leads.”

“But you have no problem using it for your own ends?”

“Like the man said, it’s legal. Why shouldn’t I?”

“I can’t win.”

“Play your cards right and maybe you’ll get a demonstration of the beast at work.”

We went to Foos’s door. He was packing his messenger bag.

“Happy now?” he asked.

“Pure state of bliss, no thanks to you. I saw Nosferatu last night, outside Leitz’s brother-in-law’s building in Queens. The brother-in-law wasn’t there. Nosferatu had a key.”

He straightened, thinking for a moment. “That can’t be good.”

“Nope. But there’s that issue of perspective.”

“Always. Let me know if you need anything. Got a meeting.”

“What are you two talking about?” Victoria said.

“He’ll explain, I’m late,” Foos said and grinned at Victoria. “Going over to the ACLU. We’re looking at ways to collaborate.”

“Okay if I give her a little demonstration of the beast at work?”

“She’s a Fed, Turbo. Strictly limited access.”

He lumbered out the door.

“I’m beginning to understand one thing,” she said, “why you two get along.”

“How’s that?”

“You are both socialists. Neanderthal socialists.”

“Sharing had to start somewhere. C’mon, demo time.”

“Cuckoo time, you ask me,” she said, but she followed me to my office. Pig Pen took a shot as we crossed the open space.

“Bayou Babe! Tiramisu?”

“It’s still breakfast time, parrot. Nobody eats tiramisu for breakfast.”

That stumped him, but I guessed not for long.

Victoria took the chair I placed beside mine, and I opened my laptop and worked the keyboard. The Basilisk hissed. It took Walter Coryell’s name in its jaws and retreated into the darkness of its cave. A few minutes later it reemerged to spit out its findings.

The Leitzes all had their problems. Marianna and her husband. Julia and her obsession over her work. Thomas and his financial irresponsibility. Coryell was different. Maybe because he was only an in-law. Coryell was a fraud.

He and Julia maintained a joint checking account. She deposited $12,000 every month, he deposited $4,000. No small amount, certainly, but it suggested he was making around $100K annually. Julia said he was very successful. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a year-end bonus or dividend payment from his company. She, on the other hand, was bringing home a salary of $300,000 and banked a year-end bonus/profit share of $2.5 mil. Those all-consuming deals paid off—at least financially.

More to the point, Coryell didn’t leave any spending trail. I’d partly guessed the Internet entrepreneur story was bull. Now I was looking at the credit card records of a man who supposedly traveled frequently on business—who hadn’t paid for a plane ticket, hotel room or rental car in years. Nor were there any lunches, dinners, Broadway shows, operas, baseball or basketball games—none of the things you’d expect a successful businessman to be spending his, or his company’s, money on. He had his own car—a two-year-old leased Volvo—garaged near the family’s apartment. Gas purchases indicated he didn’t drive a lot, other than back and forth to their house in Ancramdale in Columbia County—and he didn’t go there much either.

“That’s it?” Victoria said.

“All there is,” I agreed.

“This thing’s a bust.”

“You weren’t listening. The Basilisk isn’t the threat. The Big Dick, the databases—they’re what’s evil. And the fact that the Dick has so little information on our man Coryell tells us something, quite a lot, actually.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe he isn’t who he’s supposed to be. Like maybe the existence of another credit card in another name hooked up to another Social Security number, out of reach of preying eyes like mine.”

“You mean, Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Jekyll and Hyde with plastic.”

“Shit.” She got up and walked around the office. “We never thought of that. Why are you interested in this guy?”

“Client’s brother-in-law.”

“And if he leads a double life…?”

“Somebody bugged Leitz’s computers, maybe connected with the TV deal, I don’t know. But whoever did it knew the layout. Coryell’s the one member of the family I can’t get a fix on. It’s like he’s part of it, but not. Never around, didn’t go to Leitz’s wedding. No one in the family wants to talk about him. I bring him up, they change the subject. Even his wife.”

“That doesn’t mean anything necessarily…”

“True enough, but I saw the guy who beat me up outside Coryell’s office last night. He’s almost certainly involved in the bugging, and he had a key to the building.”

“But Coryell wasn’t there.”

“Right.”

“Still circumstantial.”

“The only reasonable doubt I have to satisfy is my own. And maybe Leitz’s.”

“You have motive?”

“Still working on that.”

“Show me what else this Big Dick can do. Christ, listen to me, I’m talking like you two.”

“You heard Foos. Strictly limited access for Feds.”

“I’m just kibitzing. Come on.”

She smiled, and my heart backflipped again, just as it had last night. I would have looked up anything or anyone she wanted.

“Let’s check something.”

I went back to work on the keyboard. In less than a minute I had the vehicle identification number for Coryell’s Volvo. A few minutes after that, the service records from the Manhattan dealership, appeared on the screen.

“What are we looking for?” Victoria asked.

“Mileage. The Volvo’s two years old. Say it gets twenty miles a gallon, average. Coryell’s gas purchases total eight hundred gallons, if we figure three bucks each. The car should have sixteen thousand miles on the clock. Service records say thirty-one thousand two-fifty at the last appointment, a month ago. Who’s buying fifteen-thousand-miles worth of gas? And who’s driving the car?”

“Wife?”

I told the Basilisk to rifle through Julia Leitz’s purchases and extract the gas charges. They totaled $1,172—maybe twenty-five tankfuls, one every other month.

“Add eight thousand miles for her, which is generous, and we’ve still got seven thousand miles, give or take, unaccounted for.”

“Someone used cash.”

“Maybe. Pattern suggests credit, but I can get the Basilisk to match that up with their ATM withdrawals if you want.”

“You can do that?”

“Take a few minutes.”

“Jesus, that thing’s pure poison.”

“Where do you think it got its name?”

“Okay, seven thousand miles. Still not all that much.”

“Twenty-two percent of the total on the car.”

“Then tell me this, smart guy: Why doesn’t his wife notice?”

“She’s not paying attention.”

“Oh come on! That’s just male…”

“Uh-uh. She’s smart. Tough too. But she’s totally focused on her work, family’s an afterthought. Her siblings told me that and I’ve met her. It rings true.”

“She got kids?”

“Two.”

“What kind of woman—”

“Spy school lesson—value judgments only get in the way.”

“You suggesting I butt out?”

“Not at all,” I said quickly. “Let’s look at phone calls.”

I worked the keyboard, and the Basilisk went back to its cave. It returned almost immediately with two lists of numbers—those Coryell called and those calling Coryell. They had one thing in common—they were short.

“Once again, not what you’d expect from a supposedly successful businessman,” I said.

“I’ll say. Can you tell…?”

“Patience.”

I sent the beast in search of the names the numbers belonged to. That took a few minutes longer. While we waited, I put my hand on Victoria’s knee and started up her thigh. She knocked it away.

“Stick to business,” she said with a smile. “You’ve got me curious now.”

“Curiosity wasn’t my goal.” I returned the hand to the knee. She let it stay there.

The calls came back up, with names this time, sorted by date, as the numbers had been, the most recent listed first. Most of the recipients of Coryell’s outgoing calls didn’t mean much to me. Incoming calls were another matter.

Victoria said, “Hey, that’s you!”

I was at the top of the list—my call from outside his office last night. Below it was an unlisted, disposable cell phone—Nosferatu’s, I was almost sure. I made a note of the number for future reference and told the Basilisk to group the calls by name. Thomas Leitz jumped off the screen. Eight calls over the last few years. I had a hunch about the timing. The Basilisk hissed—you know it, run with it. I went back to the keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Victoria asked.

“Maybe earning that million dollars.”

The detail on Thomas Leitz’s calls to his brother-in-law appeared. Sure enough, each call over the last four years coincided with the pay down a few days later of his credit card debt. The Basilisk had answered one question—where Thomas was getting the money—but it raised several others. Where was Coryell getting it? And why was he giving it to Thomas? And how much of this did Sebastian Leitz know?

Victoria said, “I’m still here, remember? What’d you find out?”

I told her.

“What is it with this family?” Victoria said.

“They’ve got more money than most. But once you start to dig into any family, you shouldn’t be too surprised by what you find. As I remember, your old man had you arrested for stealing his car. How normal is that?”

“My stepfather. And he was pissed that I wouldn’t put out.”

“See what I mean?”

She removed my hand, stood and walked around the office again.

“What are the chances,” she said from the window, “if I asked nicely and it was really important—stopping some truly evil bastards—your partner in crime would let me do a little research for a case I’m working on, with appropriate supervision, of course.”

“He’d rather swallow Pig Pen.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d say that.”

“You’ve got the entire United States Department of Justice at your disposal.”

“The goddamned Department of Justice is coming up short, if you want to know the truth. Your pal and that serpent of his produce more than a legion of FBI.”

“He’s aware of that. Hence limited access for Feds.”

“You are both socialists.”

“Guilty, but I can only speak for myself. What’s the case?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got institutional constraints, which is too bad, not least because I think you could offer some insight into the guys we’re going after.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“I meant it that way. But we might as well face it. We both have misspent youths. And you…”

“Haven’t rehabilitated myself?”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“If you’re afraid of wolves…”

“Don’t go into the forest. You told me that once before. One of your proverbs.”

She sat on my lap facing me, legs straddling mine, her face a few inches away. “I have to tell you, shug, I’m here in the middle of the forest and I’m happy about it—over the moon, to be honest—although the why of it is still a total mystery.”

“‘Love’s like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.’”

“Another proverb?”

“Bohemian poet, early twentieth century. Rilke was his name.”

“His humor is on a par with yours.”

“Don’t be too quick to judge. He also said that for one person to love another is the most difficult task there is, the one for which all others are just preparation—or words to that effect.”

That got a thoughtful look from the green eyes. “According to Kris Kristofferson, love’s the easiest thing there is, if you pick the right woman—or man.”

“Dueling poets. Their job is helping us see ourselves. Doesn’t mean they always agree.”

“Tell me this, you and your Bohemian know-it-all—why is it the things I love about you are the same things that scare me to death?”

“Rilke knew all about that. He said, ‘Our fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.’”

“You making this up?”

“Uh-uh. Think about it. You said this morning that you’re scared to death something will happen to me. I’m frightened that I won’t be able to fix things with Aleksei, and I’m terrified I’ll do something to drive you away again. Sound like dragons and treasures to me.”

She put her hands around the back of my head and kissed my lips. “I think I like that, but I need to think more about it. Since you just upgraded yourself to treasure, though, you can buy me lunch.”

“I’d love to, but I have to meet a screaming queen on Houston Street at noon.”

“Excuse me?”

“Leitz’s brother. His description, not mine. How about we reconvene at a place I know in Chinatown at two. Best dim sum in New York.”

“All right, but what am I supposed to do with my dragons between now and then?”

CHAPTER 18

Thomas Leitz didn’t exaggerate.

A scattered assortment of people mingled outside P.S. 146. One man stood out. He would have stood out in a circus. About five-ten with a platinum Mohawk that added three inches at its peak. Blue and white silk pants that hugged his skinny frame from hips to ankles. Purple leather ankle-high boots with pointed toes. A bright purple collar flopped over an equally bright orange cashmere sweater. He hadn’t bought any of it on a teacher’s salary. His face was pointed and could have been okay looking if God hadn’t forgotten his chin. His Adam’s apple bobbed below his lower lip. Even in New York City, I would have bet the dacha on his having tenure.

I’d left Victoria with a hug and a kiss outside my office building and walked north, mildly annoyed at Leitz and his family for intruding on our reunion. No getting around the fact, though, that Thomas Leitz had something on his brother-in-law and needed interrogating on that and other subjects. I walked at a leisurely pace, thinking about Victoria and dragons and treasures—and attraction. Beauty is only skin deep, or so they say. I’m not so sure, but I’ll cede the point. While there was no question her looks worked a kind of black magic on me, it was unlikely that my shaved head and stocky physique had the same enchanting effect on her. We did have several things in common. She was tough and strong minded, with every reason to be so. I can be tough minded too. She was self-made in every respect, as I was. Neither of us had a family life to speak of. We were in the same line of work (sort of, and sometimes on opposite sides), lived alone and didn’t mind it, until recently. We were both loners, without intending to be so.

Her childhood, like mine, taught self-reliance at an early age. Her father took off when she was a kid, and her stepfather almost killed her mother in a drunk-driving accident. Mom got hooked on painkillers. Stepdad chased Victoria with lecherous intent whenever he wasn’t too drunk. He caught her one night, but she laid him out cold with a cast-iron frying pan and took off, stealing his car to make her getaway, which is what landed her in the juvenile detention center. She was smart enough to realize where her life was headed if she didn’t take a different path. Reaching that kind of turning point, and recognizing where you are when you get there, was something else we shared.

She enrolled in junior college, then the University of Miami on ROTC and spent four years in the Air Force. She went to law school at Miami too, on Uncle Sam. She got a job at a Miami firm and thought she was on her way professionally until she found that every man she met, including bosses and clients, were more or less like her stepfather—only interested in one thing.

She got fired for refusing to put out, as she put it, got even, one more thing I admired, and got a new job with the Miami DA. They left her alone, and she built an impressive record jailing the same kind of SOBs who’d made her life miserable. Their lowlife intentions weren’t limited to trying to get laid—fraud, embezzlement, perjury, and theft were as common in the business world as the underworld. She wanted to make some money so she moved into private practice with an Atlanta firm, keeping the same scumbags she’d been prosecuting out of jail. She didn’t like it, but that didn’t cause her to be any less effective. The Atlanta firm got acquired by Hayes & Franklin, a big Wall Street legal outfit, and she put in to move to New York. Wasn’t long before she was a partner and running the combined firm’s white-collar crime practice—an $80 million business. The first time I asked one of her law partners about her, he called her a piranha. Of course, she’d moved on to the U.S. attorney’s office by then and just jailed his biggest client.

Success can be sexy, I suppose, but skin deep too. More often than not, the insecurities that lie beneath the urge to succeed form the foundation of character. I preyed on insecurities in the spy business, they’re what makes people tick. (Had I known that in my twenties, I probably would have passed on proposing to Polina and saved us both a world of heartache.)

One dragon guarding the attraction Victoria and I felt for each other was the fear of doing something to screw it up and drive the other away, as I’d told her. I was afraid I’d make another mistake, as I had with Polina and Aleksei—and with her almost six months before. It didn’t have to be my fault. Fate could—and probably would, since I was Russian—intervene. I just had to screw up one more time, and I knew how easy that was to do.

Her dragon took a different form. We’d traded life stories the first time we had dinner. Somewhere in the recounting, I recognized beneath the tough-gal veneer a brittleness as fine as my own. Takes one to know one, perhaps. She did her best to cover it, but self-doubt was part of her makeup—doubt about her judgment, doubt about her own attractiveness, doubt about whether she could make something like this work. And fear about how she would feel if she failed. I hadn’t had the chance to ask too much during our first round of romance, but I was pretty sure her stepfather and his successors had taken their toll. Despite her looks, smarts, and success, she doubted what she brought to the table of a relationship. As a result, I was willing to wager, she hadn’t had many that were serious. Faced with the prospect of one now, she was scared of fucking it up, just like I was. The reasons were different, but that made the fear no less real. And when I went off on my own, or declined to talk about what I was working on, as I had about Aleksei, I put those insecure dragons on high alert.

Rilke nailed fear. I’d have to look into what he had to say about doubt. Beria fell into step.

Excellent, Electrifikady Turbanevich. You’ve assessed the situation with astute Cheka prescience. And, as usual, totally sidestepped the question of whether you’re ready to do anything about it.

I was about to defend myself when my ruminations were stopped in their tracks, as was I, by the improbable sight of a large statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in full stride, arm raised to show the way, atop a Houston Street apartment building. I’d heard about this, but never seen it. The brainchild of the developer who’d put up the otherwise mundane brick complex, which he, of course, named Red Square. The statue, a large clock with misplaced numbers around its face and the clever name were supposed to give the building some Lower East Side hipster chic. No doubt Lenin changed the world. Few would argue for the better, and even they would have a hard time applying concepts like hip or cool to the first Soviet dictator. I wondered idly whether the developer had considered what his neighbors a few blocks to the north—the heart of Ukrainian New York—thought of his vision.

Thomas Leitz saw me and peeled off a small group as I approached.

“Mr. Leitz? I’m Turbo.”

I held out a hand, which he ignored while looking me up and down.

“Tough guy. Boyfriend beat you up?”

One more interrogatory chore. The Leitz siblings were consistent in their absence of eagerness to help their big brother.

“He did land a few blows,” I said, leaving his question, if there was one, unanswered. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“We don’t have that much to talk about. I don’t know anything about my big brother’s business and what I do know I’m not sharing. Any more questions?”

Coercion worked with Jonathan Stern. Thomas Leitz looked an easier pushover. “About thirty-five thousand.”

A frown on the chinless face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Four credit cards. Thirty-five thousand dollars. You could be wearing some of it right now. Carried for months, paid off in November. You’re already another eight grand in the hole. Where’s the money come from?”

“Who are you?”

“A well-informed guy. I know a lot more. Question is, what am I going to do with it?”

“I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t care what Sebastian says.”

“Eight grand says you do. You going back to the same sugar daddy to take care of that? What’s he going to want this time?”

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

“Tall guy with buckteeth and bad skin. Know him?”

“NO!”

“I don’t believe you. But I’ll tell your brother what you said.”

I didn’t think Thomas Leitz had ever met Nosferatu, but I needed to be sure, before we got on to other matters. I’d taken a step and a half west along Houston Street when he cried, “Wait!”

I took another couple of steps for emphasis before turning back. I don’t think he was shaking, but he could have been.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” I said.

He nodded once and I followed him to a footbridge over the FDR Drive and into a park scattered with baseball fields between the roadway and the river. I’ve run through it on many mornings. He found a bench and sat at one end, head in hand, elbows on knees, eyes straight ahead, not looking at me. I sat at the other.

“Where’d you get the money?” I said.

He shook his head. “Not from anyone you know.”

“The tall guy?”

Another shake. “I don’t know any tall guy.”

“Some people came to see you. Tell me about them.”

He nodded, twice. “A man and a woman. Lawyers, they said.”

“Names?”

“Don’t remember. I told them I had nothing to say. We didn’t talk long.”

“What did they want?”

“Questions about Sebastian, his business, his family. Some kind of background check, they claimed.”

“Describe them.”

He was no more revealing than Marianna or Julia, but they had to be the same two people.

As he talked, a lone man crossed the footbridge and turned north away from where we sat. He was of medium height and build and wore a tan overcoat and a flat cap. He followed a path until he was fifty yards away and leaned on the railing, looking out over the river.

“They ask about anything else?” I asked Thomas.

“I don’t remember. The rest of the family, I guess. Marianna and her husband. Julia and Walter. I didn’t tell them anything, if that’s what you want to know.”

“They ask about your debts?”

“NO! I told you…”

“So where did you get the money?”

“STOP IT!”

“I’m not a nice guy, Thomas, and I need information. Where did you get the money?”

“I… I got a loan.”

“Who from?”

“I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Family?”

He nodded slowly.

“Who?”

“I have… friends.”

Lying, like waiting, is an acquired skill. It takes practice. Thomas Leitz wasn’t good at it. The Cheka’s approach to interrogation was to use the first lie like a club and beat the subject up and down until he offered up all the other mistruths, half-truths and made-up truths he was harboring. That would’ve been easy with Thomas—he handed me the club at the first opportunity, and I already knew the answer anyway. The Cheka, however, was always after a confession first, truth was rarely an objective. I was looking for honest answers—and help. Thomas Leitz could supply either or both, though not if I turned myself into a complete enemy. I changed the subject.

“I spent the morning with Marianna. She’s in pretty bad shape.”

“Her husband’s an asshole.”

“Maybe. I think she needs help. She’s hitting the bottle hard.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“You’re her brother.”

He shook his Mohawk and looked at the ground. “Poor Marianna. I do feel sorry for her. But she shouldn’t have married him if she didn’t love him.”

“That’s what happened?”

“What do you think, smart guy?”

He was stepping around something there.

“She told me she lent you money once. Fifteen grand. You hit her again for twenty-five and she turned you down. She said you weren’t very nice about it.”

He raised his head and laughed out loud—braying long and high. Tan Coat turned to check us out.

“HAH! That’s rich. Did she tell you she was smashed, so blitzed that she practically knocked over a waiter with a tray of food? Three brandies while we were there. While I was there, who knows what she drank after I left. She was still mixing them with ginger ale then. Ugh.”

He looked around in a conspiratorial fashion and lowered his voice. “Did she tell you what she called me? This was before we even talked about money. When she ordered the second drink, I suggested maybe coffee would be good. She told me to mind my own fucking business. Her words, not mine. Then, when I said maybe she should think about help, she said, ‘At least I’m not queer.’”

He leaned back and raised his palms upward, as if to ask, What am I supposed to do? I now had two sides of another story. I didn’t care much where the truth lay this time, but the evidence of Marianna’s troubles—and her ability to pretend they didn’t exist—was mounting.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Christmas. Family rat-fuck. At Sebastian’s, of course. I try to avoid them as a rule, but holidays…” He shrugged. His voice had taken on a bitter edge.

“The whole family there?”

“Uh-huh, Sebastian, Jenny, the kids. Marianna and her children. Not Stern. Even Julia put in an appearance, mainly so she could tell everyone about all the oh-so-important bullshit she’s working on. And Walter was there. Hapless Walter. That’s Julia’s husband. First time we’d seen him in years. Sebastian sets great store by family acting like family, and Sebastian gets what he wants. Always has. You’re so smart, you’ve figured that out already.”

Something there, besides the outsized chip balanced on Thomas Leitz’s orange-clad shoulder, was interesting.

“Hapless Walter. Why do you say that?”

“Because he is. You meet him, you’ll see.”

“He doesn’t usually attend family functions?”

Thomas grinned, just a little. “So, something you don’t know.”

“Tell me about him.”

The grin went away. “Nothing to tell,” he said quickly. “Poor guy’s got loser written all over him—and he has to put up with her. We all dig our own graves.”

Maybe spending the holidays alone wasn’t so bad after all.

“Why doesn’t he attend family functions?” I pressed.

“He just doesn’t!” He looked around the playground, eyes sweeping past Tan Coat without comment. “I don’t have all day. You were asking about the lawyers.”

I let him change the subject, for the moment. “Did they ask you anything about your brother’s office? Location, layout, computers, stuff like that?”

He shook his head. “No. Wouldn’t have mattered if they had.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’ve never been there. No reason to go.”

He was telling the truth now, I was all but certain. “So they didn’t ask you to do anything?”

“No.”

“And they didn’t offer you money?”

“NO! I already told you, I have friends! This conversation is over. I don’t care what you say. Stay away from me. Stay away!” He jumped up from the bench.

“Not so fast, Thomas. We’re not finished. I’ve got more questions about Walter.”

He tried to look resolute, but it came across as petulant. “Why should I tell you anything about him—or anyone else?”

“So I don’t tell anyone about Walter and you.”

A long silence—before he sat back down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Walter’s the one who’s been paying your bills—for years. Every time you borrow too much, max out those credit cards, you call him, he comes through. What’ve you got on him? None of my business, I’m just curious. Must be pretty good, I figure he’s shelled out two hundred grand so far.”

“I DON’T HAVE TO TALK TO YOU!”

“Yes, you do, Thomas.” I put a hard edge on my voice. “This is called the squeeze. Get used to it. You have to talk any time I ask. What do you have on Walter?”

He sniffled—cold or tears, I couldn’t tell which. When he spoke, he was barely audible. “Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He looked away and looked back. His voice seemed to find some strength. “I don’t care what you believe. It’s true.”

It wasn’t true. I was certain of that. But as Victoria had pointed out, my evidence was circumstantial, based on timing. I couldn’t trace the cash from Coryell to Thomas. I couldn’t even connect Coryell to the cash. I backed off again, a little.

“Why doesn’t anyone want to talk about him? Not Marianna, not Julia, not you.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Walter’s a nonentity. No personality. Nothing for anyone to have a relationship with—that’s the best way to put it. He’s never around, and when he is, he’s just there, but he isn’t. Like his body’s just a shell. I don’t know why Julia married him, except maybe opposites attract. Or he was the only one she could find who’d put up with her bullshit. Point is, you could ask anyone about Walter and you’d get the same answer.”

I wanted to ask again, if Walter was such a nonevent, what could Thomas have to blackmail him with.

“What about his business?”

“Julia says he’s a big-shot Internet entrepreneur. I wouldn’t know.”

“You wouldn’t? He’s getting the money somewhere?”

He turned away and crossed his arms.

“He didn’t go to Sebastian’s wedding. Why not?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Another rat-fuck.”

This was getting nowhere. I shifted gears again.

“What’s Andras like?”

It took a couple of beats for him to catch up. “Normal, I guess. Average rich kid. No need or want denied. Quieter than most. More… introverted.”

“That due to the death of his sister?”

“How…?! Oh never mind.” Another long pause. “I don’t know. He was always on the quiet side. More so after, maybe, I’m not sure.”

“He see the body?”

“Everyone saw the body. We were all there. Christmas. We all heard the shot.”

“But you got there first.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?” An edginess in his voice.

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I’m not going to talk about that, I don’t care what you do,” he said trying again to sound firm. “It’s… too horrible.”

“Okay. What about interests? Andras’s, I mean.”

“Oh, how about that? Finally something you don’t know.” He paused again, perhaps relishing the moment. “Computers.”

“What about them?”

“He’s nuts about them. Number-one thing. Spends all his time online. He’s got more gear than I have outfits.”

“What about Irina?”

“Who’s Irina?”

“Friend? Girlfriend?”

“Don’t know her. Sorry.”

He didn’t sound sorry.

“When was the last time you saw Andras?”

“Christmas, like I said.”

“Andras was there?”

“Of course. I told you—we all were.” Shrillness on the rise. “Very important to be present and have a good time.”

“How did he seem, Andras?”

“About the same as always. I didn’t pay much attention.” Another silence. “Wait! I do remember one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

His voice took on the conspiratorial tone. “Christmas lunch. There were some fireworks this year. Andras and Sebastian. I remember thinking, What set that off? Halfway through lunch, Julia got a call and announced she had to leave. Some big fucking deal, of course. She just took off, as she does. A few minutes later, Andras said something to Sebastian. I was at the other end of the table, I couldn’t hear what. Sebastian told him to forget it. Andras said no way. Sebastian started to lose his temper. You’ve seen that display, I’m sure. Andras wasn’t having any. He shouted something like, ‘I am not staying here with him,’ and left. That was it.”

“Who was he referring to?”

“Walter, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“No other candidates that I know of.”

“Why would he say that?”

Smug replaced shrill. “No idea.”

“Okay,” I said. “What happened then?”

“We went back to lunch, pretended nothing happened.”

“That normal?”

“For us, it is.”

“And Andras didn’t come back?”

“Nope.”

“And Walter didn’t say anything?”

“Walter never says anything. Julia does the talking for both of them.”

“Anybody else? Say anything?”

“As you may have found, since you’re so fucking smart, we Leitzes are very good at ignoring things, sweeping problems under the rug, where they can fester out of sight, out of mind, where no one has to acknowledge them.”

His assessment was colored, as everyone’s is, by his own resentments. That didn’t mean it was inaccurate.

“One more question.”

“Good.”

“Since you’re all so good at sweeping things under the rug, what have you got on Walter?”

He shook his head once, stood, and started off without looking back.

“THOMAS!”

He stopped about six feet away. He didn’t turn back.

I said, “Tell me this much—whatever it is, the tall man I mentioned, could he or anyone else be pulling the same levers?”

He didn’t hesitate. Another single shake of the head and he almost ran to the footbridge over the Drive.

I waited on the bench until the last speck of orange disappeared on the other side. The man in the tan overcoat didn’t budge. Two things were clear about Thomas. He had something—maybe several somethings—to hide, but whatever it was almost certainly had nothing to do with his brother’s computers.

CHAPTER 19

I took the rest of the afternoon off.

The dim sum place was a hit. We followed lunch with a movie in the Village, a romantic comedy Victoria chose. I didn’t find it particularly romantic or comedic, but my sense of humor is usually out of step with Hollywood’s these days. My mind was also on the Leitzes, who were providing a better story, although not much about them was romantic or comedic either.

The wind had died down, and we walked home, stopping at an old-school Village butcher for a couple of veal chops, which I ordered cut thick, and a liquor store for some red wine. The chops, stuffed with prosciutto and mozzarella and sautéed with a sage brown sauce, were as delicious as was the wine, a Pinot Noir from Oregon. Bud Powell played bop piano on the stereo, causing Victoria to wrinkle her too small nose in mock distaste whenever he launched into one of his more angular solos. I think it was mock, she didn’t complain out loud. The last of the wine led to holding hands on the sofa and that led to holding everything else in bed. I fell asleep thinking she’d been back a bare twenty-four hours and we were already settling into a routine that was fast becoming one more thing to hold on to.

I left her sleeping at 6:00 A.M., took my usual run through a cold, dark southern Manhattan and stopped at the office on the way back. At 6:55 on Sunday, the space was tomblike. Pig Pen was still asleep—contributing markedly to the silence.

I fired up the Basilisk and fed in Andras Leitz and Walter Coryell. The beast went to its cave.

Andras had called his uncle last night—three times. Uncle Walter hadn’t answered.

I sent the Basilisk back for the location of Andras’s cell phone.

Newburgh.

Okay, I asked, what’s the kid been up to?

It bucked and hissed. Let me tell you.

Andras had hopped the 4:30 Delta shuttle to New York yesterday afternoon, while Victoria and I were in the movie house, taken a cab from LaGuardia to the Harlem–125th Street train station, paid with AmEx, where he’d purchased a roundtrip ticket to Beacon, across the Hudson from Newburgh, also with AmEx. The exact location of his calls to his uncle was vague, somewhere south of town. Not my fault, the beast said, cell phone location can be spotty, depending on the service provider. Do your own legwork.

Nothing else new on Walter Coryell in the vast reaches of the Big Dick, which further supported the supposition of another identity.

I went back to the spending records of Andras and Irina. They were both regular patrons of Crestview Pizza and Mike’s Grocery, both on Main Street in Crestview, Massachusetts. Their purchases took place on nights and weekends. Irina bought her gas at Crestview Citgo, filling up every couple of weeks, at night. Except last night. She’d bought almost eleven gallons at 12:24 A.M. at service station on the Massachusetts Turnpike, a mile from the intersection with I-84. Right on the most direct route from Newburgh to Gibbet.

I checked Facebook, looking for a picture of Andras. To my surprise, he didn’t have a page. Neither did Irina. Andras supposedly spent all his time online. One more thing that didn’t add up.

I walked the two blocks home, stopping for breakfast makings. Victoria was just stirring.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Run. Research. Breakfast in twenty minutes.”

She emerged as I finished frying sausage and whipped the eggs for an omelet. No sleep in her eyes.

“What kind of research, shug?”

“Whereabouts and whatabouts of certain Leitzes.”

“You couldn’t have done this yesterday?”

“Staying current.” But her point had a point.

“Bull. You didn’t want prying eyes.”

“We each have our own cases.”

“That just means you’re not sharing. How about some Tabasco in the omelet?”

I did as she asked, and we ate in partly contested, mostly contented, silence, especially when I relented and told her what I’d found and that I had no idea what it meant.

She acknowledged the gesture silently with a nod and a smile.

I said, “Why are you so interested in the Leitz case?”

“Because it’s yours. When I was sitting by the pool at the Gage Hotel, one thing I figured out for certain is, we’re in this together. If you’re absorbed in something that’s likely to lead to trouble, then I’m worried. If I’m on the outside trying to peek in at what you’re doing, like last time, we aren’t going very far. I can’t live that way, and I don’t think you want to either.”

I took her hand and looked into her eyes. “You’re right, of course. Want to talk about what you’re working on?”

Green flash. “You’re a bastard.”

“Just making a point. In the spirit of togetherness, however, I’m happy to discuss my case. Want to hear it?”

“Why do I have the feeling I’m being set up?”

“No setup. I’ve got two teenaged kids, each with eleven mil in the bank. They may be mixed up with an organized crime outfit called the Baltic Enterprise Commission. I know the girl is. Her father, her uncle, and her stepfather are all partners. The Leitz kid’s up to something with his uncle, the uncle’s being blackmailed by his brother-in-law. The client’s sister is a lush who won’t give her husband a divorce even though he’s sweet-talking any broad he can find into the sack. The client may or may not be carrying on an affair with the ex-wife of one BEC mobster, now married to another. He, by the way, tells me, everything’s fine. Welcome in.”

At some point during my summary, she’d removed her hand from mine, and now she was winding up to knock me silly. Then she smiled.

“You know, you make it goddamned difficult for a girl to do the right thing. This a national character trait, or did you learn to be a pain in the ass all by yourself?”

“Probably some of both. You read Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? No simple plots.”

“Try Faulkner, shug. Or Flannery O’Connor. No normal characters. You’d fit right in. Tell me one thing—would you know any of this without the Basilisk?”

“The problem isn’t phones, computers, credit cards, and bank accounts. It’s what people do with them.”

I almost could hear the Basilisk chuckling two blocks away, if rooster-headed, hawk-bodied serpents can chuckle.

“Including kids?”

“It’s all in the Big Dick. Age isn’t a factor.”

“That ain’t right,” Victoria said.

“It’s your country. Can you keep quiet for moment? I have to call Leitz and he’s going to want to lecture me on proper client relations.”

“I could give him a pointer or two, but I’ll do the dishes instead.”

I dialed Leitz’s number.

He came on right away.

“You finally surface,” he said.

“I’ve been busy—on your nickel.”

“I’m used to having my calls returned.”

“Apparatchiks at Lubyanka and Yasenevo used to tell me the same thing. One advantage of working in the field.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow as she picked up the plates.

“Lubyanka apparatchiks weren’t paying you,” Leitz said.

“Neither are you—yet. I need a photograph of your son.”

“Andras? Why?”

“The people who bugged your computers have touched every member of your family. I think he’s next.”

“WHAT?! What the hell do you mean?”

“Just what I said. They’ve visited your brother and sisters, but you know that by now.”

Pause. “He’s at school.”

“Gibbet School, Gibbet, Massachusetts.”

“HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

The voice was loud enough that even Victoria heard it. Her eyebrow went up again.

“Big Dick. Point is, if I know, they know.”

“You’re not saying… This has nothing to do with him.”

“Tell that to Nosferatu.”

“You haven’t told me what this is all about.”

“Only because I don’t know yet. But I do know—from personal experience—these people don’t hesitate to use violence. The photo?”

“Jesus. All right. But I don’t understand.”

“You’re up against some bad people. I’m doing the best I can to make sure they don’t hurt anyone any more than they already have. E-mail the picture. Soon as you can.”

“Tell me this. No business deal is worth my family. Should I back out of the bid?”

“Can’t answer that. Like I said, I still don’t know what this is all about.”

I broke the connection.

Victoria said, “You’re a bastard.”

“I’m on his side.”

“You used fear to get what you want. You have no reason to believe this boy…”

“It’s for his own good.”

“You’re still a bastard.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

I dialed another number.

Gina answered on the first ring. “Turbo! It’s been months. I’ve been worried. How are you?”

“You mean you were worried about your source of business drying up.”

“You can be a real bastard, you know that?”

“A growing consensus around that point of view. You want work?”

“Sure.”

I asked how soon she could get up to Beacon.

“It’s my last semester, Turbo. I’m on cruise control, just waiting to hear from law schools. And I can use the money.”

“I’ll send you a picture of a kid. His name is Andras Leitz. He took a train there last night, then went across the river to Newburgh. Probably arrived around nine. Work the cabs at the station, see if you can find one that took him.”

“Got it.”

“If anyone or anything feels remotely weird, catch the next train out of town.”

“You’re the boss.”

I doubted Nosferatu was in Newburgh, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I put down the phone.

“I thought you worked alone,” Victoria said.

“I use college students sometimes for jobs like this. Used to use actors, but they’re not always reliable. Gina’s a senior at NYU, applying to law schools. I’m hoping she gets into one here. She’s the best.”

“Do I infer correctly that she called you a bastard?”

“Not the first time.”

“I think I’d like to meet her.”

CHAPTER 20

Gina called late that night.

Victoria and I had spent the day on neutral ground—the Museum of Modern Art. We agreed to disagree on the relative merits of Impressionism versus Expressionism. I dragged her in front of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, she retreated to Monet and Renoir. We found some common ground in Picasso and Hopper, but lost it again when we got to Kelly and Diebenkorn.

It didn’t matter, we held hands and were happy in each other’s company. I cooked a chicken in a pot full of garlic for dinner, and she bought another good bottle of wine, a Hermitage from France’s Rhône Valley. She said tonight was her turn on the stereo, so we were listening to a medley of Tammy Wynette and George Jones. I was trying to convince her that the fact that Charlie Parker liked country music was a good reason to listen to Charlie Parker—a losing argument, even I realized that going in—when the phone rang.

Gina’s voice was full of accusation.

“Turbo, you ever been to Newburgh?”

“Once, I think.”

“Then you know what a shit hole it is.”

She’s never reticent about expressing her opinions.

“You called to give me your impressions?”

“Just noting there oughta be a premium for a burg like this, especially on weekends.”

“You said you wanted work.”

“What the hell are you listening to? Have you gone redneck?”

“George Jones. I’m told he’s more American than John Wayne.”

“Whatever. It took the whole day, but I found the cabdriver, and I found the motel where he took the kid. He remembered him because the motel is a total sleaze joint, and he didn’t think it was a place a kid like that would go. But now I’ve missed the last train and I’m stuck in this urban landfill overnight.”

“I thought it was a shit hole.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“Where are you now?”

“Outside the motel—Black Horse Motor Inn. I tried to talk to the manager. He said he hadn’t seen the kid. Then he said if he had seen the kid—and he wasn’t saying that he had—the kid was long gone. Then he told me to get lost.”

“You try money?”

“Turbo, do you hire me because I’m a moron? I offered him a hundred bucks and tried to flirt with him, but I got bubkes. In fact, he kinda threatened me.”

Gina has plenty of attributes. She’s smart, pretty, engaging—and can flirt with the best of them. If all that, plus a C-note, got her thrown out, then the Black Horse had something to hide. Another kind of approach was in order.

“Get out of there. Find a decent hotel, I’m buying.”

“Good luck in this dump.”

She told me how to locate the Black Horse, and I assured her the check was in the mail. She muttered something about combat pay and hung up. Of the half-dozen kids who work for me, Gina really is the best. But you do have to listen to a lot of blowback.

The next morning at 7:05, I was doing sixty up the FDR in the Potemkin—alone. I wasn’t happy about it—neither was Victoria—but since I didn’t know what I’d encounter at the Black Horse, I told her I was better off traveling solo. She said that meant I was looking for trouble. Another argument I wasn’t going to win.

The Black Horse was just as Gina billed—a seedy two stories tucked into a row of low-rent strip malls and fast-food joints on the edge of town. Newburgh’s had a tough time in recent years, tough enough that a few years ago the mayor offered to host a high-profile terror trial because he thought it might be good for business. Ten cars were parked in front of the Black Horse’s two dozen units. Just eight thirty, I sat in the lot, at the far end from the office, and watched. A door to one room opened and a red-faced man looked out, then left and right, before a heavy-set woman walked quickly to her car, head down, and drove off. That scene was repeated a few minutes later, a few doors down, except this time, a fifty-ish man in a suit with no tie held the door for a twenty-ish man in jeans, who made an equally speedy exit. The woman who left the third room, without bothering to check who might be watching, wore a short skirt and sheer blouse beneath her open coat. She looked ten years older than she probably was and had all but certainly spent the previous night working.

Victoria introduced me to a Louisiana songwriter, Mary Gauthier, who has a song about the Camelot Motel and the grace-fallen people who stay there. I had the feeling I was parked in front of the inspiration.

I got out of the car and shivered in the wind. Dust and trash flew around the parking lot, more potholes than pavement. I started toward the office, but something on the ground caught my eye. I knelt for a closer look. A used syringe, its plastic chamber ground into the asphalt, the needle still intact. I strolled the lot and found six more, by which time I was cold and went back to the car. Detroit gets justifiably criticized for its automobiles, but I’ve never heard a bad word against its heaters. I warmed up while I thought about what I’d found.

The door to the end room on the ground floor opened, directly across from where I sat, and a thin man in his twenties came out, wearing only a flannel shirt and dirty jeans. The cold didn’t seem to affect him. He walked toward the fast-food place next door, his right hand scratching his left arm, before he disappeared among the dumpsters that demarcated the two properties. I got out and followed.

The burger joint was doing a good breakfast business and smelled of grease. The average weight of the customers, somewhere north of two-forty, regardless of height or gender, indicated a cause-and-effect relationship at work. The thin man had to wait. He fidgeted and scratched. A sharp face, goatee, long hair tied in a grimy ponytail. I stood in the next line, two back. When his turn came, he ordered egg biscuits with gravy and two coffees light with extra sugar. The guy behind the counter slipped a foil packet into the bag and palmed a fifty in return. Breakfast of champions.

I followed Skinny back to the motel, closing the gap as we approached his room. He took the foil packet from the bag and put it in his pocket. He was still twitchy and didn’t notice me until I grabbed his arm as he unlocked the door.

“What the fuck?!”

“Inside.”

I shoved him in and closed the door. A woman about his age, also thin, sat on the bed, naked, except for the sheet around her waist. She had gray-blue skin, sunken eyes, fallen breasts, and a needle track running up her left arm. She made no attempt to cover herself. Crumpled foil, a spoon, hose, and syringe on the bedside table.

“Who the fuck are you?” the thin man said.

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not here for you. What’s your name?”

“None of your fuckin’ business.”

I took a twenty from my pocket. “Play your cards right, you could earn a couple bucks this morning. Or I can make a shitload of trouble. You choose.”

“You wanna fuck Cindy, it’s gonna cost ya more than twenty,” the man said, leering. I was tempted to hit him, but that wouldn’t help things.

“I asked you a question. What’s your name?”

“You a cop, mister?” Cindy spoke for the first time, her voice just above a whisper.

I shook my head.

“Talk to the man, Les, we can use the bread.”

Les started to tell her to shut up, then thought better of it. I picked up the tinfoil.

“Little short this morning?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“True. But maybe I can help you out.” I held out two twenties this time.

“Listen to the man, Les,” Cindy said.

“Your girlfriend’s giving you good advice.”

“She ain’t my girlfriend. She’s my wife.”

I was tempted to tell him if she was my wife, I’d wrap her in something for warmth if not decency, but that was none of my fucking business either. I showed them the photograph of Andras.

“I’m looking for this kid. He was here Saturday night. You see him?”

I thought recognition flickered through his eyes, but he shook his head. Cindy raised herself on her knees and looked over his shoulder.

“I remember him. I…”

“Shut up, stupid cunt!”

Les spun and slapped her. She fell backward across the bed. Enough for me. I took him by the belt with one hand, the back of the shirt with the other, and ran the skinny body across the room into the wall, headfirst. I dragged him into the bathroom, grabbed the foil packet from his pocket, and dropped him in the tub. He looked up with half-conscious eyes.

I held up the smack. “You make a single sound before I’m through here, this goes down the drain. You hit Cindy again, I will find you, wherever you are, just like I found you today, and pound you until there is nothing left to pound. You understand?”

He didn’t move. I stomped on his ankle. He yelped in pain.

“Do you understand?”

“Y… yes.”

“Don’t come out of here until I’m finished.”

My threats were meaningless, except to flush his heroin, which he’d realize as soon as I left, but they made me feel like at least I tried. I returned to Cindy, wide-eyed on the bed, still naked. I found some jeans and a shirt on the floor, which I handed over.

“Put these on.”

I turned my back, ever gallant Galahad, while she dressed.

“Okay.” She was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“If I gave you enough money for a bus or a train, is there somewhere you could go, get yourself cleaned up, start over?”

“You mean… leave Les?”

I nodded.

She thought about it but not long enough. She shook her head. “He’s all I have.”

“He’s scum, Cindy. Look at this dump. Is this what you want? He get you hooked?”

“He… He’s all I have.” She started to cry.

I’d tried. Breaking her away from Les would take more than one attempt by one leather-coated Galahad on a cold January morning.

“Tell me about the boy.”

She looked away.

I held out the foil packet, making the shift from chivalry to shit. “Tell me about the boy, or I’ll throw this into the wind.”

“No! Please…”

“You saw him. When? Saturday?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know. About nine, I guess. Maybe later. We were going out, get something to eat. He and a girl were a couple doors down. They were yelling, that’s how come I noticed.”

“A girl?”

“That’s right.”

“What did they say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Angry yelling?”

“I think so.”

“Angry about what? Please try to remember.”

She closed her eyes and scrunched up the hollow face. She was trying or putting on a good act. I waited.

“I know! I remember!” Her eyes popped open, and she smiled, pleased with her accomplishment.

“That’s great,” I said, clapping my hands in encouragement, feeling like a fool.

“He kept shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ She kept saying, ‘How should I know? This was your stupid plan, remember?’”

She looked doubtful for a moment, then her face brightened again.

“At least I think that’s how it went. Yes, that’s it. I remember the part about ‘stupid plan’ because she was really angry about that, like he’d done something without telling her, and she was pissed, just like I would have been.”

I wondered how often Les left her out of the plan. That was probably unfair, if only because Les didn’t seem the type ever to have a plan—beyond securing the next fix.

“Did they say anything else? Anything about this guy they were expecting?”

“No. You don’t have it right. They weren’t expecting anybody, only him, he was. And she was pissed because he hadn’t told her.”

“That’s right. I’m sorry.” Having remembered her story, she was sticking to it. “What did the girl look like?”

“Tall, blond hair, I think. I didn’t get a really good look at her. She was wearing, like, a ski parka. And a wool hat pulled down over her head.”

“How old?”

“Same age. As the boy, I mean. Young, twenty, maybe less. I don’t know.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. I mean, they shouted back and forth three or four times, I think. The same thing about where is he, how should I know, then they went inside. We left.”

“And when you came back?”

“Didn’t see them again.”

“Were they still here, you think?”

She shrugged.

“What time did you come back?”

“I don’t know. Ten thirty, eleven, maybe.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see them again?”

“No.”

She looked up at me with her sunken eyes. “Can I have my fix now, please. I need it.”

I looked over at the bathroom door and made one more stab.

“You sure you don’t want to get out of here? I’ll take you. You just tell me where.”

Her eyes followed mine, stopped on the bathroom door for not long enough, then swung back to me.

“I need it. Please.”

CHAPTER 21

The motel manager didn’t add much to Cindy’s story. He didn’t want to add anything until I placed a used syringe on the counter and told him my next stop was the Newburgh police if he didn’t rearrange his attitude.

A man had rented the room by phone, one night, under the name Brian Murphy, from New York City. The kid had collected the key and paid the bill in cash. The manager didn’t see the girl, or if he did, he wasn’t saying.

“We get a lot of folks through here, bud. None of them want to be remembered. We do ’em that favor.”

If it wasn’t the truth, it was a damned good lie.

I returned to the Potemkin’s heater and thought about how far I wanted to take this. I’d been hired for one job, and I had the answer to that—at least the pieces. Nosferatu had placed the bug. Coryell was his agent. No doubt in my mind he was the man the cleaners had described. Nosferatu worked for Konychev. Konychev knew Leitz. Leitz wanted a name. That was enough to secure my fee and the Malevich. But I didn’t have the connections. What was Nosferatu after? What did he have on Coryell? Why had Coryell sold out his brother-in-law? What did Thomas have on Coryell? And what was Leitz’s multimillionaire son up to? The last question was none of my affair, but I’ve always found it hard to walk away from anomalies like that.

What the hell? Nothing to lose, except maybe my client, and I was all but done with him anyway. I dialed the number of Andras Leitz’s cell phone.

“This is Andras.” A pleasant-sounding voice, slightly high in pitch, counterbalanced by low volume.

“My name’s Turbo. I work with Foos. I’m doing a job for your dad and I have a question for you.”

I waited while he processed that. “Dad didn’t say anything about you calling.”

“I didn’t tell him I planned to.”

I waited some more.

“What’s the name of Foos’s parakeet?” he asked.

“Always good to be sure,” I said. “It’s a parrot, as you know. Pig Pen. He calls me Russky. He flunked charm school, which you also know if you’ve met him.”

He laughed, relaxed. “That’s for sure. He calls me Whiz Kid.”

“At least that’s complimentary.”

“It’s embarrassing. Especially around Foos. You said you have a question. Sorry to rush. I’ve got class in a few minutes.”

“I’ll be quick. The job I’m working on has to do with your dad’s office security. I don’t know that much about computers, your father’s in meetings all day, and Foos isn’t around, or I’d ask him. Is your home networked through the Leitz Ahead system?”

“That’s right.”

“So if someone’s online at your house, they’re inside the network, inside the firewall.”

“Sure. Why?”

“Foos thought he spotted traces of unusual activity. I was trying to think about where it could have originated.”

I expected a few moments of silence then a feeble lie. That’s what I got.

“I do all my work here at Gibbet, on the school’s network.”

“Sure.” Except during vacations and breaks. I was willing to bet he got straight As in math.

“Tell me one more thing, and I’ll let you go.” I think I heard him sigh with relief. “When was the last time you talked to your uncle Walter?”

Relief morphed to apprehension, maybe fear. “Why?”

“Nobody’s heard from him. You’ve been trying to reach him.”

“How do you know that?” Definitely fear now.

I kept my voice pleasantly conversational and nonthreatening. “I know a lot of things, more than I want to, actually. You were at the Black Horse Motor Inn in Newburgh Saturday night. You tried calling your uncle three times. Was he supposed to meet you there?”

He took a long time before he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My class…” He tried to keep his voice calm and level, but I could feel the stress through the atmosphere.

“Uncle Thomas says you’re all good at sweeping stuff under the rug, and I think each of you has stuff you don’t want anyone else to know about. You seem to.”

Another silence. I let him simmer.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, maybe Irina does. She was there too, right, at the Black Horse?”

When the odds are four to one in your favor, it’s no surprise that you win the bet.

“NO!”

“Hey, don’t get excited. I was just going to give her a call. She could’ve heard from your uncle.”

“STAY AWAY FROM HER! YOU HEAR ME? STAY AWAY! THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER.”

He broke the connection.

I dialed Irina’s cell phone. He got there first, or she just didn’t answer. I was sent to voicemail. I didn’t bother with a message. She’d see I called, discuss it with him (or maybe not), and decide whether to answer when I called again.

The heater blew warm air, too warm. I got out and walked around the windy parking lot. I’d accomplished what I knew I would. Drawing myself in deeper. But I was no closer to the link I was looking for—Andras-Irina-Coryell to Nosferatu. I got back in the Potemkin and pointed the bow south toward the city.

I tried Irina from the Bronx and was mildly surprised when she answered.

“Andras tell you about me?” I asked without introduction.

“You’re Russian.”

She’d done some homework, quickly. “That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Moscow mainly, but I’ve lived all over. New York now.”

“Cheka?”

Definitely doing some checking. She had the means and connections.

“That’s right, First Chief Directorate, if you’re interested.”

“Chekists are pigs.”

“That what you tell your stepfather?”

She didn’t pause—or bite. “I only wanted to hear your voice, so I can avoid it if I hear it again. I have nothing to say.”

She had plenty of presence for her age, no question about that, even over the phone.

“Hold on. I don’t want anything to do with you or Andras. Your bank accounts are your business.”

I meant to freeze her and I did. I could hear soft breathing, the breaths were shorter than a minute ago.

“I only want to know about Andras’s uncle Walter. What happened at the Black Horse?”

“What do you know about that?”

The question came fast, accusation wrapped in nerves. I’d pricked the tough-girl veneer. But only slightly, she asked what not how?

Maintain the ascendancy. They teach you that in Cheka Interrogation 101. They didn’t train you specifically to interrogate seventeen-year-olds, but anyone, of any age, could be in the chair. My mother found that out. What had she been asked? What had she answered? Beria chuckled in the background.

“You and Andras were supposed to meet Uncle Walter at the Black Horse. He didn’t show. What happened?”

She laughed. “You’re not as clever as you think you are. I don’t know anything about any Black Horse. Any more questions, Cheka pig?”

She understood ascendancy as well as I did.

“Let’s talk about those bank accounts.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Lot of money for a couple of teenagers.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Twenty-two million is a lot of money to make up. But like I said, I’m really interested in Uncle Walter.”

“Be careful, Chekist pig. You know what happens to Chekists who make mistakes.”

She cut me off. The girl was tough and smart—and experienced, much more so than she should have been. Jenny Leitz had picked up on it, but she hadn’t grasped the full degree. Irina had played our short interrogation like an expert. Not that surprising, perhaps, her father and stepfather were top oligarchs. She’d been learning at the feet of experts since she was a baby. She and Andras were doubtless comparing notes. I still couldn’t see what any of this had to do with the bugging of Leitz’s computers.

Not that it mattered. I fully expected to be fired by the time I got back to Manhattan.

CHAPTER 22

Suspicion confirmed.

Leitz was waiting at my office. He and Foos were bent over a laptop in the open area, comparing notes on something. Leitz had switched to blue cashmere today. Same corduroys, from the looks of it, same shoes.

“Don’t you believe in progress reports?” Leitz said, looking up, trying to be confrontational, but not able to manage it. His eyes were red with bags underneath. He was tired, and for him, decidedly subdued. Looked like Jenny had told him of her diagnosis.

“Didn’t see the need. You had your man in the tan coat for that.”

He started to say something, stopped and shook his head. “He figured you spotted him—on Houston Street.”

“Before that—outside Marianna’s.”

“How’d you figure he was working for me?”

“Process of elimination. Who else would have someone following me around?”

He nodded. “Serves me right. Foos said I could trust you, but…”

“I’m told you like to control things.”

He nodded again. “Guilty.”

“You want your report now?”

He shrugged. “If you think it’s necessary. I actually came down here… I want to ask you to stop. The computers, whoever it was, it just doesn’t matter that much anymore.”

He looked down at the coffee table.

“I’m finished anyway,” I said. “I can tell you who and what if you want. But it’s likely to cause more pain.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

It took a minute before he raised his head. Tears in his eyes. “You… you know?”

“She told me. Only when I asked, although I already knew about the doctors and the tests.”

“Jesus.” He started a lunge for the laptop. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl it across the room. Foos thought the same thing and was ready to grab it first. But halfway there, Leitz just collapsed and fell back on the sofa. Sorrow overwhelmed temper. Foos was unconvinced. He closed the lid and moved the computer out of range.

“Life ain’t fair, man,” he said, mainly, I think, to say something.

I went to the kitchen and came back with the vodka bottle. Leitz shook his head when I offered him a glass.

“It’ll help, if you don’t overdue it.”

“You mean, like Marianna?”

I shrugged.

“Just a little,” he said.

I poured him a finger. He took a sip and put the glass on the table and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to unload my burdens on you.”

“That’s all right.” His family had already done that.

He picked up the glass, took another swallow, and shook his head when I offered a refill.

“Tell me what you found out,” he said quietly, “although I’ve almost decided to abandon the TV bid. I’ve got more important things to focus on.”

He sounded sincere. I believed him, but I wondered how he’d feel a day or two or ten down the road. I’m determined we should all lead as normal a life as possible, Jenny Leitz had said. She’d be encouraging him to keep on.

“We can do this another time if you want,” I said.

He shook his head. He was struggling to stay afloat in an emotional tsunami. For the moment, the trader was still in control. “Go ahead.”

I double-checked with Foos. He dropped his lopsided visage ever so slightly in assent.

“Your computers were bugged by the Baltic Enterprise Commission—an organized cyber-crime outfit. We told you it was someone like this, and we were right. They specialize in Web hosting for phishers and spammers, but they’ve expanded into hacking for hire and industrial espionage. Nosferatu, the man who beat me up, is the BEC’s enforcer. I established that through contacts in Russia. He got the cleaners to place the bug.”

“How did he…?”

“Your brother-in-law, Coryell, was the agent. He was with Nosferatu when they bribed the cleaners. He told them where to put it. The cleaners described him. I’ve since seen Nosferatu at Coryell’s office. He had a key.”

I half expected an explosion—WALTER? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN? WALTER?! I DON’T BELIEVE IT. HE’D NEVER… What a difference a day and a diagnosis of death make.

All he said, weakly, was, “Walter?”

“Afraid so. I wish there was another explanation, but…”

“Why would he…?”

“Coryell’s compromised. He’s being blackmailed, I assume by Nosferatu and the BEC, but also by someone else. I don’t know what the leverage is, but it’s powerful. It’s already cost him two hundred grand by my count, maybe more.”

The money focused his attention. “Two hundred thousand? Blackmail? Who told you this?”

I was trying to get through the story without squealing on Thomas. I didn’t give a damn about him, but he wasn’t connected to the main event, and adding his troubles to the mix would only make matters worse for Leitz. Maybe I was doing my own under-the-rug sweeping.

“It’s in the Dick,” I said.

“But… Have you talked to Walter? What does he say?”

“I haven’t seen Walter. Neither has anyone else—in at least a week.”

“What about Julia?”

“She tells me her husband is very busy. I doubt she knows anything about blackmail or Nosferatu, and I haven’t enlightened her.”

He shook his head. “Okay, but… Jesus. Tell me about this Baltic… what do you call it?”

“Baltic Enterprise Commission. It’s a partnership—three oligarchs—that’s suffered some setbacks and internal disagreements in recent months. The founding partner’s Efim Konychev. He still runs the show, maybe, but in that world, disagreements often lead to violence. Someone tried to gun him down in Moscow last month.”

I was watching for the reaction. He didn’t try to hide it. He fell against the back of the couch like a man who’d been slugged. I waited, but he didn’t say anything. The eyes, still red, went blank as he stared into the distance of the space. I hesitated a moment before delivering the next blow.

“Konychev’s sister is Alyona Lishina.”

“CHRIST!”

The old Leitz came back in an instant. He balled his fists, leaned forward, and flailed in the air. Foos picked up the laptop.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?”

He pushed himself to his feet, thought about kicking over the coffee table, thought better, and marched around the room. Pig Pen, who’d been attracted to the door of his office by the commotion, beat a fast retreat to his back perch when Leitz headed in his direction. I glanced at Foos, who shrugged and nodded—You’re doing the right thing. I wasn’t certain I shared his confidence.

Leitz came back and stood close to my chair. “What do you know about Konychev?”

“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

He went back to the sofa.

“He’s an oligarch—now. He was a high-level propaganda apparatchik in Soviet times. He bought up media properties during transition. He controls most of the nonstate media in Moscow. He also grasped the commercial potential of the Internet early. All the spammers, phishers, and pornographers out there need servers to call home, preferably servers somewhere hard to find, in a jurisdiction with authorities who aren’t eager to assist the rest of the world’s police. The former Soviet republics have such places in abundance, and as new converts to capitalism, they were keen to attract the business.”

He shook his head again. “I had no idea.”

At the risk of setting off another explosion, I said, “I find that hard to believe.”

“No… You don’t understand. I really didn’t. I didn’t know who he was.”

I waited, my skepticism evident. Foos shifted in his seat, reached for the vodka bottle, thought better and left it where it was. He wasn’t buying either.

Leitz looked from one of us to the other.

“Okay, I know it begs credulity. But… here’s what happened. I met a woman, back in October, through my son, actually. He’s dating—or trying to date—her daughter. They go to the same school. She’s wired into the New Russia. Her husband’s…”

“I know who he is. Taras Batkin. Russian-American Trade Council. It’s a front. He’s also BEC, by the way, one of the three partners, and Alyona’s first husband, the girl’s father, is the third.”

“Oh my God. I had… You have to believe me… I had no idea. I’ve been played for a total fool. If this gets out…”

Sounded to me like he was already rethinking the TV bid, but I stayed quiet.

“I was working on the network transaction,” Leitz went on, “putting together a limited partnership to pursue it. My bankers were having trouble raising money. TV’s out of fashion among institutional investors and… I was a victim of my own hubris. Nobody wanted to put money with someone who was seen as unpredictable—‘mercurial’ was the word you used the other day, right?”

“That’s right. They worried you might decide to give the money back,” I said with a smile.

That got a small grin in return. “Exactly. Anyway, Alyona was all over me in the following weeks. Not the way it sounds, she was all business and she was relentless. She said she could raise hundreds of millions, maybe billions, and I offered her the same commission deal I give my bankers. She organized lunches and dinners and presentations. We went to London and Paris and the South of France. That’s when the rumors started. There was nothing ever to them, I promise you that. It was all business. Jenny knew every move I was making. I met all kinds of people I never knew existed, and more than a few did invest. But there was always one big fish out there—the white Russian whale she called him, it was her idea of a joke, but she wouldn’t say any more. Meetings kept getting set up and canceled. I offered to go to Moscow, but she said that wasn’t a good idea. She wouldn’t say why.”

I knew why, but let him tell his story.

“Then, in December, she tells me I’ll get a call. I do, and a man comes to see me, and he’s in a position, through a partnership he controls, to invest three hundred million, maybe more. You have to understand, in this kind of deal, the value of three hundred million is three billion or higher because of the leverage it allows. I was suspicious, of course, but he seemed to know all about her—and me. I was also getting ready for the day when we’d have to raise our bid—and I needed his money. I told him his group and any investment would have to pass scrutiny with U.S. regulators, the SEC. He said that wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Konychev,” I said.

He nodded. “It all fits.”

It did fit. “You meet him in your office?”

“Yes.”

“He placed the voice bug under your desk. You get his money?”

“We made a handshake deal, and our lawyers have been doing the paperwork, but I haven’t heard from him directly again, no.”

“You won’t. You won’t see any money either.”

Leitz buried his head in hands. Foos and I exchanged a look that said, Give him some space. Foos took the laptop to his office. I returned the vodka bottle to the kitchen, leaving Leitz a wide berth on my way to my office. Even Pig Pen picked up on the tension and kept quiet. I think he turned down his radio.

I felt a large presence at my door a half hour later. Leitz looked worse than when I arrived.

“I didn’t mean to add to your troubles,” I said.

“Not your fault. You did what we agreed. Give me an account number, I’ll have your fee wired tomorrow. I’ll tell my lawyers to draw up a loan agreement for the Malevich. Best to document that.”

“Thanks.”

Even under the pressure he was feeling, the business brain was functioning. I told myself not to be judgmental—I was the beneficiary.

“What are you going to do about Coryell?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Walter… Let’s just say, this is one more in a long string of issues with Walter.”

I nodded. Not my business to press. I thought once more about saying something about Marianna and Thomas, whose problems were no less serious, or potentially threatening. Let them pass. Andras called out from a Siberian corner of my mind—Hey, what about me and my eleven mil? I told him to shut up. Don’t climb into another man’s sleigh, as another of our proverbs goes.

Leitz stepped through the door and stuck out his big hand. I stood and took it. His grip was almost painful.

He said, “I can’t say it’s been fun working with you, but… I guess, I hope we meet again under better circumstances.”

“Me too.”

He let go and lumbered across the floor until he disappeared among the servers. I stood in my door rubbing my wrist.

Foos appeared, shaking his mane. “Man don’t know what hit him.”

“I think he’s got a pretty good idea. Problem is, he doesn’t know what’s coming around the curve up ahead. Like that song you play, trouble ahead, trouble behind…”

“You’d be better off dead?”

“Let’s hope not.”

CHAPTER 23

I told Foos I needed a straw man, and he set me up with William Ferrer. Foos consults for banks and financial institutions, partly because he enjoys charging usurious fees for jobs that to him are pedestrian, and partly because he wants to keep tabs on what the bastards are up to, as he puts it. He maintains a stable of well-heeled straw men—straw women too—synthetic identities he’s created by marrying deceased persons with other people’s Social Security numbers. He gives them the financial basics—bank accounts, credit cards, sometimes passports and driver’s licenses—and brings one to life when he needs someone to do something anonymously. One of his ways of toying with the Big Dick.

Tomorrow when I received Leitz’s money, I’d move a hundred grand into Ferrer’s account at Citi, where he was already sitting on $2,748, and send a debit card to Aleksei. Half of me said it was guilt money for having abandoned him as a child, the other half pegged it as down payment on the guilt to come, courtesy of L. P. Beria. The little bit that was left rationalized that Aleksei had provided a key tip about Alyona Lishina, so this was his commission. That part of me walked home happy. Except I kept thinking about smiling, terminally ill Jenny Leitz, who was soon likely to add more pain to her list of ailments. Half of the world’s major religions lay claim to a righteous God. I agree with the Bolsheviks on one thing—who’d want Him? He’s a mean-assed SOB.

By the time I reached my door, I pushed those ruminations aside. I was a million dollars and a third of a Malevich up. The odds against that were astronomical, some kind of celebration was in order. I told Victoria to wait downstairs while I went to the garage.

I’d trade my apartment for the look on her face when I pulled up in the Potemkin.

“Wow! That’s the biggest car I’ve ever seen. A Cadillac, right?”

“Eldorado. ’Seventy-five.”

“’Seventy-five? We were fighting the Cold War in ’seventy-five. How the hell…? You’re a socialist. How many socialists drive Cadillacs?”

“Always wanted one,” I said. “Ever since I saw a picture in a magazine, the first time I was stationed here. I found this in Florida in ’ninety-three. It’s called the Potemkin, after the battleship and Eisenstein’s movie.”

“What movie? Who’s Eisenstein?”

“You have some holes in your education.”

“They didn’t teach Communist Party propaganda at Thibodeaux High. This thing got a heater that works?”

“It was built in Detroit. You want to put down the top?”

“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I’m also a warm-blooded girl—as you’ve been rediscovering.”

I took the FDR to Fifty-ninth Street and continued uptown on First Avenue. If Victoria guessed our destination, she didn’t say anything. I found a parking place on East Eighty-first.

“Giancarlo and I are on a first-name basis,” I said.

She smiled broadly, and we walked two blocks to Trastevere.

I held the door and followed her in. Giancarlo knocked two customers and a waiter sideways in his haste to get across the room.

“Signora, I…”

He was uncharacteristically confused by proper restaurateur-patron protocol, unsure whether to hug her, kiss her, or just shake hands. She solved the problem by putting her arms around him and kissing both cheeks. He looked at me over her shoulder as if to say, What did I tell you?

“It’s good to see you Giancarlo,” she said. “It’s good to be home. Turbo tells me he’s become a devotee of your cooking.”

“Si, Signore Turbo, he comes all the time. But always alone, until tonight.” His voice dropped and he leaned forward, whispering, “And I don’t think he appreciates the wine.”

“He has a lot of holes in his education. We’re working on that.”

Giancarlo gave every indication of owning the world as he led us to a table. He fussed over getting Victoria seated and unfolding her napkin. She said she’d like a martini and I nodded in agreement. He came back with the drinks, recited the specials, and we chose the seafood salad and wild mushroom pasta we’d had the first time we were there together.

When the salads came, Giancarlo appeared with a bottle that he held out to Victoria, label up. “A ’ninety-seven Brunello, the Montosoli from Altesino. My gift. Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Giancarlo. That’s very kind. Turbo thanks you too. In fact, I think I can hear him sighing with relief.”

Giancarlo looked at her, beaming, then at me. “To tell you the truth, signora, so can I.”

“Just out of curiosity, how much was the wine, do you think?” I asked as we drove downtown.

“On his list? Probably five hundred, maybe six.”

It had been completely different from that first Barolo. Different grape, different region, different climate and soil, Victoria said. But it shared a complexity of flavor and structure that was surely intriguing—but not $500 intriguing.

“Another bottle I won’t be having again,” I said.

“Don’t be a cheapskate. I’m not a cheap date.”

“Five hundred dollars is more than most Soviet collective farms produced in a year.”

“And where is the Soviet economy now?”

We put the Potemkin in the garage and walked through the chilly streets to my apartment.

“That was a lovely evening, thank you,” she said, taking my hand in hers.

We made love slowly and luxuriously.

“Mmmmm. It doesn’t get any better than this,” she said before she fell asleep.

It does get worse. And it would, starting the next morning.