No Time for Heroes

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

It was far more difficult to resume the following day. Cowley, remorseful for letting himself be trapped in the first place, was now swamped by the conviction, which Danilov could not argue him out of, that he was responsible for Lena Zurov’s murder. And when Maksim Zimin was brought before them the Mafia man was, initially, less frightened.

The second problem was easier for Danilov to handle than the first. He let the resumed interview run for less than five minutes before snapping off the recording machine, calling the other Russian a fool and ordering him to be returned to the life-sentence wing. Zimin obviously did not think he was serious until the guards began to manacle him again. He began to scream, as he must have screamed most of the one night he’d spent there, and fell baby-like on to the floor. Danilov let it go on for quite a long time before calling the guards off.

‘Don’t fuck with us!’ he warned, taking over Cowley’s command of the previous day. ‘I’ve seen the photographs. You don’t have any pressure, not from here, where you are. We can do with you exactly what we like. I am prepared to talk a deal, although not for the pictures you don’t anyway control. You do what we want, you won’t ever be put in the pit downstairs. Try to be stupid – just once – and I’ll guarantee that’s precisely where you’ll go, after your trial here…’

‘… What do you want?’ broke in Zimin.

Danilov told him, without any authority to make the promise, the tape still turned off to prevent a record of the bargaining: it wasn’t possible for a detective to be completely honest, ever, Danilov thought, in faint justification.

‘I want to be back in Russia, before I agree,’ said Zimin, in weak desperation. ‘Want it discussed, with my own lawyer present. Get the guarantees.’

Danilov was about to press further but Cowley forced himself into the interview, straining his professionalism to the utmost. ‘You’ve got more to tell us here, though: prove your co-operation here and you get the rest. Our guarantee.’ All the arrangements were going Danilov’s way: he still had two murders in Washington he now understood but was no closer to solving. He wanted something, too.

Another unrehearsed intrusion, thought Danilov, irritated. He’d have to let it go. He was later to be eternally glad that he did.

‘What?’ demanded Zimin again.

‘Details of the Swiss account. How it worked. What Paulac did and who he did it with, in America.’

‘I don’t know any of that.’

‘How could you negotiate a ten million dollar deal with Sicilian and American Mafia without knowing the details?’ challenged Danilov.

‘The Swiss part was handled by Gusovsky and Yerin.’

‘What about Zavorin?’ demanded Cowley. ‘You called him the money man.’

‘He was to discuss and agree the financial arrangements, if we got to that here: the contracts. But we didn’t get to it.’

They could sweat Zimin again in the pit, but Danilov was impatient now. ‘Zavorin knows you’re on the komitet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re going to tell him – order him – to tell us everything he knows. Now! Otherwise it’s back downstairs.’

Ivan Zavorin did not need the theatre of dungeon cells to persuade him to talk: they’d broken Zimin, and so it had been the correct, American-led strategy to concentrate upon him, but Danilov thought they would have got something, in time, from this man, too. Zavorin’s stutter was more pronounced, after the time he had spent in custody, and he seemed almost pathetically grateful when he was brought into the interview room and told by Zimin to disclose all he knew about the Swiss arrangement.

It wasn’t as much as either investigator had hoped, but what he did disclose was enough for Cowley later to admit they should have pressed the accountant harder and sooner. Zavorin’s understanding was that the embezzled Communist Party funds were not in a secretly numbered account, as they had wrongly assumed, but held by an anstalt , an even more secret trust corporation that could be untraceably manipulated by its founders. He didn’t have the directors’ names, nor that of the corporation. His role, Zavorin insisted, had been limited to financing the drugpurchasing with accountants to whom the Liccio clan and John Palma had been supposed to introduce him, after the initial meeting at which they had been seized. He did not, personally, have access to the anstalt; when they’d left Moscow, that was being negotiated by his lawyer-accountant partner, Sergei Mikolaivich Stupar.

‘You don’t have access yet?’ demanded Cowley, confused.

‘There was a transfer going through. I don’t know any more than that.’

Only Cowley realised at once there was now a paper trail to follow, because only Cowley knew there was a legal treaty between Washington and Bern under which the traditional bank secrecy laws of Switzerland could be abrogated if there was evidence money involved was intended for, or the proceeds of, drug trafficking. Which Zimin’s confession provided. The only thing of which they couldn’t be sure was that Ilya Nishin – Raisa’s father – and Serov himself would be directors whose names could guide them to the corporation itself.

Both family names were there. In less than thirty-six hours, there came confirmation from the Swiss capital that a corporation named Svahbodniy existed, with a Geneva registration address: because of the proof of its drug intention, any trading activities of the corporation had been frozen. Neither Cowley nor Danilov commented that svahbodniy was Russian for ‘free’.

During those thirty-six hours there were two more sessions with Zimin. The man provided a lot more Mafia identities and two addresses – a restaurant on Glovin Bol’soj, and Gusovsky’s house on Kutbysevskij Prospekt – which were virtually Chechen headquarters. When Danilov challenged the other Russian that he knew more, Zimin nervously admitted that he might, but that he wanted to be back in Russia before disclosing it. Anxious to get to Switzerland, they decided it wasn’t worth pressing him further.

On the eve of their departure, a prominent anti-Mafia judge and three of his bodyguards died in Palermo when their car was blown up. Melega insisted it was a retribution attack for the Villalba arrests. He also said the three Sicilians continued to refuse to talk about Villalba, even though they had been taken point by point through Zimin’s admission: so did John Palma. The only reaction to the Russian confession had been Umberto Chiara’s soft-spoken insistence that Zimin would be killed in whatever jail he was sentenced to, anywhere in Italy. Danilov thought it would probably be difficult keeping the man alive in any penitentiary in Russia, as well.

That night Melega hosted a farewell dinner in a restaurant near the Spanish Steps, which had an eerie unreality because it had to be cleared of all other diners and surrounded by armed carabinieri. There were toasts to future anti-Mafia successes and assurances of lasting friendships and reunion plans for their return to give evidence at the eventual Italian trial. Throughout, Cowley sat rigid-faced and unresponsive. The only toast for which he showed any enthusiasm – or even properly drank – was to David Patton, who had recovered sufficiently to be flown back to America.

The Geneva meetings were little more than formalities, which Danilov thought they could have completed without an overnight stay, but the reservations had been made. Escorted and chauffeured by the embassy-attached FBI agent, an eager, fast-blinking man named Paul Jackson, they went first to meet Henri Charas, the police inspector handling all the Washington enquiries. It only took an hour to go through the file: there was no doubt the Swiss photograph of Ilya Nishin showed the same man as the print Danilov had taken from the Massachusetts Avenue apartment and which Raisa Serova had been so anxious to recover.

Charas drove with them to the irregularities department of the Finance Ministry, in Bern. Heinrich Bloch, the director, was a pedantic, stick-dry accountant who had their encounter recorded verbatim by a corseted secretary, and insisted upon giving details of the access treaty, which they didn’t want, before getting to the Svahbodniy corporation, which they did. The incorporation documents had already been translated into English and Russian, from the original French, for their benefit.

An anstalt was a corporation which did not issue shares for the benefit either of the founder or of others. Instead the founder – or holder of the Founder’s Certificate, which was a bearer instrument showing all the ownership rights – had power to amend the articles of incorporation, appoint or remove directors and name beneficiaries.

It need not necessarily be profit-making, nor operate as a business: it could be a holding company, which seemed to be the case with Svahbodniy. It had been founded with an initial deposit of $30,000,000, in June, 1991: Ilya losifovich Nishin was recorded as the founder, and the other directors were Yuri Yermolovich Ryzhikev, Vladimir Aleksai Piotrovsky, Vladimir Alekseivich Kaplan and Michel Paulac – who was protectively identified both by his adopted Swiss name of Paulac and also as Mikhail Panzhevsky.

The change in the board and control of the anstalt had come, under the beneficiary clause, in April, 1992, upon the death of Ilya Nishin. None of the $30,000,000 appeared to have been used for any transaction: commission payments, which had been drawn in cash in the name of Michel Paulac, had been met by interest earned upon the original deposits.

In the records of the corporation there was an enquiry by a lawyer acting for Yuri Ryzhikev, concerning the status of the corporation after Nishin’s death. Another, separate approach had been made since the freezing of the account under the Bern/Washington agreement.

‘We’ve been lied to,’ said Danilov.

‘But very well,’ agreed Cowley.

‘How widely is this drug treaty known about?’

‘If it was public knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to trace the bad guys, would we?’ said Cowley.

‘The Swiss are extremely good at keeping secrets,’ said Bloch.

‘Good,’ smiled Danilov.