Malice

10

"Got to go, honey bunny, I'm freezing my sweet keister off out here, and the cell doesn't work inside the restaurant." Ariadne Stupenagel had stepped into an alley off Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn to escape the bitter wind that was howling in from the Atlantic, but she still shivered in the cold.

"If you come home now, mon cheri, I promise to warm it up for you," Murrow said in his best attempt at a sexy French accent, which came off as a fairly accurate rendition of the romantic cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew.

"You want to warm my cell phone up?" Stupenagel laughed. She adored the man and found him incredibly sexy-but not when he was trying to be sexy and French. Then it was mostly just funny.

"No, your sweet…how do you Americans say?…derriere," Murrow continued.

"Oooh, Pepe," she squealed, wondering if he would get the joke. "When you talk like so, it makes me purr ze cat."

"Well, my little kitten, sounds like you have need of scratching, ze l'amour."

Stupenagel giggled and sighed. Her boyfriend really did have wonderfully talented fingers and knew just how to use them for "ze l'amour." But she had work to do and it was time to focus.

"Sorry, baby," she said. "I need this interview for a story, and this might be the only chance I get. It may take a while, so don't wait up…but if you want, I can wake you up, as only I can, when I get back."

"Ah, oui, madam, please and most definitely," Murrow mumbled. "Until then…au revoir."

"Ciao," she replied, and flipped the telephone shut. She allowed herself a smile for a few seconds longer, and then put on her hard-nosed journalist game face. She'd been in the business a long time and knew that her pursuit of the St. Patrick's Cathedral story had her treading in shark-infested waters. She was making someone very nervous and/or very, very angry.

They'd already tried to kill Gilbert, though she knew that she was the real target. However, that hadn't stopped her lover's boss, Butch Karp, from haranguing her over taking chances with "other people's lives."

Stupenagel had told him to mind his own business, though she knew he was just being protective of his aide and friend. Recalling the battle on the rooftop, she did feel a pang of guilt for endangering her lover for the sake of a story. But investigative journalism was more than what she did, it was who she was, and Gilbert had known that going in. And he hadn't tried to blame her for nearly being strangled to death. His only comments had been regarding his concern for her safety.

"They tried once, they'll try again," he'd said as they lay in bed that night after the police left.

She'd tried to allay his fears with the old journalism adage that the most dangerous time for a journalist with damning information on a potentially dangerous person or organization, like the mob, was prior to publication. "After it's out, the only thing they'd accomplish by killing me is to bring more of a spotlight on them," she said. "Remember back in 1976 when Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, was killed by a bomb planted under his car? He'd been digging into allegations of land fraud concerning the mob and corrupt officials. I was one of thirty reporters from newspapers around the country who went to Phoenix as part of the 'Arizona Project.' We finished the job Bolles had started-a twenty-three-part series on official corruption, organized crime, and land fraud in Arizona. Even the mob now thinks twice before killing a journalist because it focuses too much attention on them."

Murrow was hardly mollified. "I wouldn't care that the job got finished if someone blew you up."

"Ahhh, you're so sweet, Silly Gilly," Stupenagel replied, and then kissed him. His steadfastness in light of his near-death experience touched her. Most of her former lovers would have headed for the hills to protect their hides, much less been more worried about her than themselves. "But you're missing my point. The sooner I can put a wrap on this series, the sooner there's no point in killing me. When I get done with them, the cockroaches will be scurrying for cover, not trying to get to me."

The look on Murrow's face told her that he didn't believe a word of it. He knew that what she'd said was true, but only to a degree. The bad guys were sometimes perfectly willing to kill a journalist out of revenge and to send a warning to other journalists that sometimes the First Amendment was bought with their blood.

The first round had gone to Stupenagel and a wooden baseball bat. The dead man had been identified as Don Porterhouse, a multiple offender with a history of sexual assault, assault, and burglaries. After she read his police jacket, something didn't seem right; Porterhouse didn't strike her as the sort to attack grown men with a garrote, and there was no mention of him being a trained martial artist. But a friend of hers at the Medical Examiner's Office had confirmed that the body he had autopsied had been positively identified as Porterhouse.

The bored NYPD detective who'd been assigned to the case had attached himself to the theory that Porterhouse had intended to burgle and rape Stupenagel and that Murrow had surprised him. "He just grabbed the first weapon he could think of," the detective said of the garrote. When she ventured the possibility that the man had been hired by someone upset with her stories, the cop had politely taken notes, but she could tell that he was doing it to humor her.

The story was the reason she was out on a blustery night to finally meet the man with the Russian accent who had been supplying her with her inside tips regarding Nadya Malovo, the Russian terrorist, and now some character named Jamys Kellagh, who was supposedly in the middle of it all.

She had been trying to meet the Russian source personally ever since the first call, but he'd refused. Then out of the blue, he'd called her that afternoon and suggested that they meet that evening. "I have something to give you in person," he said.

Although she didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, Stupenagel was curious about the change of heart. "Why not just mail it to me?" she'd asked.

"Because what I have to give you is one of a kind and cannot be trusted to a third party."

"Can you tell me anything about it? I mean, geez, it's awfully cold outside." There was no way in hell she wouldn't have met the man, but she'd learned from experience to always try to garner as much information while she had someone talking, just in case they didn't show up or disappeared altogether.

"Don't play games," the man warned. There was a pause, and she could hear him talking to someone in the background, although not well enough to understand what was being said. "I will tell you it has to do with Jamys Kellagh."

"You win," Stupenagel surrendered. "Where do you want to meet?"

On the way over to Brooklyn, she'd stopped by the Karp-Ciampi loft, ostensibly to check in on Butch's rehabilitation. But really she wanted to feel him out on the Russian agent, Nadya Malovo. The attack on St. Patrick's had resulted in several murders on his turf, and even if he was cooperating with the feds, she thought, ol' Butchie wouldn't have been too happy to hear that a suspect had been turned over to the Russians and then conveniently disappeared.

However, the district attorney and his wife were getting ready to entertain "a couple of friends from Idaho," and there'd been no time to talk. I didn't know they had any friends in Idaho, she'd thought as she left the loft. Her reporter radar told her to delve a little more into these "friends" when she could get Marlene alone with a bottle of wine.

Stepping back out of the alley and onto the bustling sidewalk, Stupenagel got the impression as she always did in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach that she had awakened in a foreign city. The part of the avenue that she was on ran beneath the elevated subway track, which created a steel cavern that looked straight out of a futuristic movie. But it was hardly the physical setting that was unsettling.

Framed by the community of Coney Island to the west, Manhattan Beach to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, Brighton Beach was home to one of the largest Russian communities outside of that country, so much so that the inhabitants referred to the enclave as Little Odessa. Hardly anyone on the streets, whether they were store owners, vendors, or passersby, spoke anything but Russian, though the salesmen quickly switched to English when they spotted a visitor with money. The signs above and in the windows of the stores were written in Cyrillic, and even the Dogs Must Be Curbed sign had a Russian translation.

Stupenagel had done plenty of stories on the Russian community of Brighton Beach, and she knew that they were different from the Russian Jews who'd escaped what had been the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. And she knew that they were different than the wave of Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in the neighborhood at the beginning of the twentieth century after fleeing the pogroms of tsarist Russia.

While not as openly murderous as the tsarist Cossacks, the socialist regime that the new immigrants had lived under suppressed their culture to such a degree that they conformed to be more like their non-Jewish Russian neighbors than the orthodox Jews of the past. Jew was their ethnicity, but not necessarily their culture and religion. For instance, the fashions they wore-like their non-Jewish counterparts-looked straight out of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, at least the winter scenes. Everybody seemed to be wearing expensive fur hats and coats.

Wishing she was as well insulated, Stupenagel pulled her Saks Fifth Avenue wool coat around her shivering body as best she could; she maneuvered down the sidewalk past old crones dressed in black and muttering Russian epithets, and vendors hawking "real Bulova watches" and potato knishes.

Naturally, the area boasted the best Russian restaurants in the five boroughs, and Stupenagel's stomach growled at the thought of tonight's dinner with her "date." The caller had named the restaurant, and she'd immediately known its location, having been there many times in the past.

The Black Sea Cafe was famous for its mouthwatering dumplings called vareniki and pelmeni. Vareniki came in a dozen varieties of fillings, from sweet farmer cheese to sour cherries, enclosed in paper-thin dough, topped with sauteed onions, and bathed in drawn butter. When she'd had her fill of them, she would switch to pelmeni, which were stuffed with boiled meats and then drenched in a sauce of cheese and eggs and gratineed.

The plan was to wash it all down with plenty of ice-cold shots of Jewel of Russia vodka. However, the buzz wasn't what she was looking for as much as information. She'd yet to meet the man who could keep up with her drinking ability, though Butch Karp's colleague Ray Guma, a man she'd had a brief and forgettable fling with, was close. She knew that Russians looked at drinking as a sort of competition, and thought she'd have no trouble getting the informant liquored up and talkative.

She knew one other thing about the Black Sea Cafe. It was owned by a Russian gangster named Vladimir Karchovski and his son, Ivgeny. Brighton Beach was also home to the Russian mob in the United States. It was an interesting aside, and she'd long hoped to interview the Karchovskis, but right now it didn't matter to her who owned the restaurant as long as the dumplings were hot and the vodka cold.

Walking in the door of the restaurant was like being greeted by an old friend with the smell of borscht, the moody dark woods and leathers that made up the interior, and the haunting sounds of the balalaika. Looking around, she noted a group of men who were well into the Russian tradition of extravagant toasts. For a Russian, drinking vodka was a celebration of life in all its joy and grief as only a Russian could express it, full of melancholy and fatalism.

One of the men had just finished a lengthy toast, after which they'd all clinked their glasses and downed the contents before reaching for the zakuska-hors d'oeuvres said to bring out the flavor of the vodka. Then they filled their glasses and began another round, or charka.

Like any good journalist taking in her surroundings, Stupenagel made mental notes of the other people in the restaurant. Sitting at one table was a fortysomething couple who appeared to be either leaving or returning from a trip. Just one of them, she corrected herself, noting that they sat with a single suitcase between them.

There were also several families in the restaurant. The parents, in the relaxed way of Russians, did little to settle their children, who were running around the restaurant, diving in between the legs of servers and patrons, as if it were a playground. She'd dodged one child when she spotted the man waiting at a corner table beyond where the couple with the suitcase sat. He was looking right at her and inclined his head slightly, indicating the chair across the table from where he sat.

Stupenagel took a deep breath and walked past the table of drinking men. The man giving the latest toast stopped what he was doing and instead raised his glass to her. The other men said something in agreement and also raised their glasses. She smiled and they drank before going back to their business.

Walking up to the table where the single man sat, Stupenagel repeated the phrase she'd been told earlier. "I'm here on a blind date." She wanted to roll her eyes-secret code phrases were too Hollywood for her tastes-but this was his game and she had to follow the rules.

"Then you've come to the right place," the man said, without a trace of a smile that a beautiful woman had the right to expect from such an exchange.

This guy is all business, Stupenagel thought as she took a seat. She took a mental snapshot of his face-the crooked nose and scars around the eyes, as if he'd been a boxer, and the clear, dark eyes that were assessing her just as thoroughly.

The mutual investigation was interrupted when one of the men at the drinkers' table shouted something. He sounded angry.

"What's he saying?" Stupenagel asked.

Her companion listened for a moment and at last cracked a smile. "He said, 'When I was released from prison three weeks ago, not one of you bastards would lend me so much as three rubles… Nobody but Ivan, who is my true friend and not one of you other bastards.'"

"Sounds heavy," Stupenagel said. "But nobody seems to be taking offense."

The man shrugged. "Why should they if it's true? In Russia, we have a saying: 'The first charka is for health, the next for joy, the third for quarrel.' We are a moody people who understand that it is better for a man to get such things off his chest than to let it fester inside and someday erupt."

"What if somebody does take offense?"

"They would be in the wrong as long as he does not step over certain lines, or tell an outright lie," the man replied.

Seeing the opportunity for a segue, Stupenagel replied, "Speaking of the truth, thank you for the information you have given me."

The man held up his hand. "I am doing as my employer wishes," he said. "He's asked me to tell you more and to give you something of vital importance. But first, we eat. Are you hungry?"

"Famished." Stupenagel smiled.

"Good," the man said, and clapped his hands sharply, which brought the immediate attentions of a waiter who was obviously nervous. He said something quickly to Stupenagel's companion, who nodded.

Well, whoever this guy is, Stupenagel thought, he's got some pull at the Black Sea, and I'll bet it ain't because he's a big tipper.

"Vareniki-all varieties-and pelmeni," the man said. "And a bottle of Jewel of Russia."

Stupenagel noted that the man placed the order in English rather than Russian, which everyone else in the restaurant was speaking. It's a message to me, she thought, and acknowledged aloud what it meant. "Well, someone seems to have done his homework."

The man tilted his head to the side and gave her a wry smile. "Yes…how do you say in America, 'Knowledge is power.' My employer is aware that you enjoy dumplings and Jewel of Russia vodka. And the waiter told me he remembers you from other visits."

When the bottle arrived, the man filled their glasses and raised his with a short toast. "Prost. To health."

Tossing back her drink, Stupenagel savored its warm, smooth course down her throat but noticed that the man wrinkled his nose. "Don't tell me I've met a Russian who doesn't like Jewel of Russia," she said.

"It's dela vkusa-a matter of taste," he said, then leaned toward her conspiratorially. "To be honest, I prefer Armadale…but it's a Scottish vodka, believe it or not, and they don't serve it here. In fact, if I asked for it, I'd get my ass kicked."

Stupenagel laughed as her companion, who told her his name was Gregory, filled their glasses again. She had the sudden impression that she might have met her match and would not be drinking this man under the table that night. So she resigned herself to whatever happened and was soon happily scarfing dumplings while Gregory kept their glasses filled and regaled her with stories of his time in Afghanistan as a Red Army soldier fighting the mujahideen.

"I hope America kicks the asses of those evil bastards," he said. "These religious zealots will not be happy until every man has been collared and made a dog to their imams and every woman made chattel. I wish we could have killed them all. But we were an army of conscripts, young boys straight off the farms of Ukraine and the streets of Leningrad; we didn't have the heart of men who think they are fighting for Allah."

They polished off dinner with blintzes for dessert and a pot of strong Russian coffee. Through it all, the waiter had been attentive but made no attempt to hand Gregory a bill.

In the meantime, the restaurant emptied. Two families were left, their exhausted children now asleep or fidgeting in their seats. Only two of the men who'd been in the drinking group were left-one staring blankly up at the ceiling with tears streaming down his face, the other snoring with his head on the table. The couple was drinking coffee and waiting on their bill.

Only now did Stupenagel's companion reach inside a leather coat he'd placed on the chair next to him and produce a five-by-seven manila envelope.

"What have you got there?" Stupenagel said, hoping she didn't sound too drunkenly excited. She reached for the envelope.

But Gregory held it just out of her reach. "This is a photograph taken in Aspen, Colorado. The man who took this photograph had been asked to watch for Nadya Malovo. He spotted her and followed her to a meeting in a bar. The others at this meeting were Andrew Kane and Jamys Kellagh."

Stupenagel's sobriety level shot up several notches. She just about jumped across the table for the envelope, but he still kept it out of her reach. "I'm not through," he said with a wolfish grin. "I am told to impress upon you that this is the only known copy-it is not very good quality and our attempts to make other copies have been less than adequate."

"Why not have the photographer make you another?" Stupenagel asked.

Gregory's eyes grew hard, but he waited for the couple to get up and leave before he spat out, "He was murdered. Unfortunately, he was also old-fashioned and used thirty-five-millimeter film instead of digital. He made this and faxed it to my employer. It is not very good quality. He was supposed to send the film, but someone burned his darkroom down with him in it, and the film went with him. So this is all we have, but will be enough, no?"

"Maybe," Stupenagel said. "But now you've got me all excited, and I need to take a whiz before I pee my pants. So just hold that thought, and envelope, for a moment."

Gregory gave her an amused look. "I have nowhere else to go," he said, and smiled.

Stupenagel tottered rapidly to the far back of the restaurant for the bathroom, her mind whirling with the possibilities. First, a Russian spy implicated in the plot to kill the Pope, and now, in a few moments, she would see the face of Jamys Kellagh, the man behind the curtain. Pulitzer, here I come.

Out in the restaurant, Gregory sat back in his chair. As clandestine meetings went, this one had been rather enjoyable. The woman was pleasant to look at, with large breasts and a good sense of humor. Plus, she could drink like a man. Perhaps his boss would find other reasons for him to meet this woman.

Only then did he notice that the couple who'd been sitting near them had left their suitcase behind. He'd been trying to think why the woman had seemed familiar. She'd obviously dyed her blond hair brunette and the glasses seemed phony. Suddenly, though he'd never seen anything but grainy photographs of her, he knew who she was.

"Nadya!" he yelled, and started to rise from his chair just as the suitcase bomb exploded.

It blew the windows out with such force that an old woman standing in front of the restaurant died of a million little cuts that sliced through veins and arteries and bled her dry in seconds. Thousands of ball bearings shredded the two young families and the two friends who'd been drinking together, as well as a reputed Russian gangster named Gregory Karamazov. The simultaneous flash fire from a canister of high-octane jet fuel that took up half the suitcase immediately torched the interior of the cafe, incinerating anything that would burn, including the envelope and photograph that Karamazov was holding in his hand.

The walls crumbled and then the world was absolutely still for just a split second. The second passed and the vacuum was filled with screams and shouts and the sound of sirens in the distance.