Rasputin's Shadow

20

The Sledgehammer.

Yet another of the high-quality individuals we’d welcomed to our land of opportunity with open arms, only to end up bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

I’m not sure that he was tired, poor, huddled, or yearning to breathe free when we let him in. In fact, I can’t imagine that the person who rubber-stamped his visa didn’t have a pretty good idea of what kind of lowlife he really was. But we still let him in, and here we were, sixteen years later, wasting time and money investigating his sordid activities and looking for a way to either lock him up-and waste more time and money that way-or kick him back out.

Same old, same old.

Yuri Mirminsky came into the country on a business visa, indicating he’d be working in the movie industry. When we got our first taste of what he was really up to, we discovered that the real reason he’d left Moscow was because it had become too dangerous for him there, what with the savage competition between Mafiya mobsters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, Mirminsky never made it to Hollywood. He got busy right here in New York and was running one of the strongest ROC groups on the whole East Coast.

Yeah, we’ve even got an acronym for it. ROC. Russian organized crime.

Collateral damage from the fall of Communism.

I often wondered if we’d have been better off with the Evil Empire still in place.

The Sledgehammer’s talent was much like Lucky Luciano’s. He was an organizer. He took bit gangs of Russian bangers and stitched them together into one big crime corporation, with him running the show. And his talent served him well. His branch of the Solntsevskaya gang now had more than two hundred upstanding immigrants living among us and beavering away at drug-running, extortion, and a whole bunch of other fine pursuits.

The first time I heard of him, I remember wondering where he got the nickname. My wishful thinking was that he’d been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel. Maybe he was. I mean, back then, who wasn’t? But this sledgehammer was different. It originated from his early days in Russia, before he came to the States. After the Wall came down. Back when he was an out-of-work KGB “niner,” an unemployed member of its Ninth Directorate who’d gone from muscleman providing protection to the Kremlin’s top dogs to up-and-coming bratok-a low-level Mafiya thug. Yuri got into a fight with some poor schmuck and he punched him so hard the guy’s guts spilled out. Literally. The guy had recently had surgery and his stitches hadn’t been out for that long, but still. One punch.

I don’t know about the choice of nickname. I’d have gone with Drago. Or Popeye. But maybe that last one was too American. Besides, the French Connection movie had it locked down. For my generation, anyway.

The problem was, Mirminsky was insulated. I’d never met the guy, but the Bureau had been involved in a couple of cases over the years that linked back to him, the most recent of which was a colossal fraud where Mirminsky and his associates operated dozens of small medical “no-fault” clinics and bilked car-insurance companies out of tens of millions of dollars for fictitious treatments of car-accident victims. We never got anywhere near taking him down. Mirminsky was a smart vor-what Russian Mafiya bosses were called, short for vor y zakone, meaning “thief-in-law”-and he knew how to work the system. He never had any direct involvement with any of his cabal’s dirty deeds. Nothing ever got tied back to him, which is how it was with most, if not all, of the Russian mobsters who’d left the old country for the security and due process of the West. They raped and pillaged, they partied, we watched.

Depressing stuff.

Still, he’d lost two underlings here, which was something to smile about. And he was also clearly involved in whatever had led to the death of two NYPD detectives, which was going to bring down some serious heat on him.

Maybe his days on our sunny shores were numbered.

I wasn’t holding my breath. But I was happy to do everything I could to help bring that about.

“We ought to pay the Sledgehammer a visit,” I told Aparo as we hit traffic on the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. “Rattle his gilded penthouse of a cage.”

Aparo didn’t answer immediately. I glanced across and saw that he had a little grin going.

“What are you smiling about?”

He put on a mock-pensive look, then said, “I think we should. But before we do that, I think we need to rattle someone else’s cage before she gets too much of a heads-up about what just went down.”

I knew exactly what he was thinking. And, in fairness, I’d been thinking the same thing. We also needed to know more about what seemed to be the key to all this: Sokolov. Which was why I called Larisa Tchoumitcheva right there and then and told her we needed to meet, pronto.

“J. G. Melon’s in an hour,” I told Aparo after I hung up with her. Then I added, “I don’t have time to drop you off at the office. York Street subway station good for you?”

His face dropped for only a couple of seconds before he realized I was kidding, but those seconds were priceless.

LARISA HUNG UP WITH Reilly, thought about it, then dialed another number.

Her boss took her call promptly.

“I just got a call from Reilly. He wants to meet.”

“Good,” the man answered. “We need to know more about what happened at the motel. Have you heard anything new?”

“No more than we already know. Koschey took out the two bratki who were watching over Sokolov’s wife.”

“Which means he’s got her now,” the man said. “And he’ll use her to draw Sokolov out.”

“No doubt.”

Larisa’s boss went quiet for a moment, then said, “We can’t let Sokolov slip out of our hands. Do you understand? This is imperative. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

Still with the secrecy, Larisa fumed inwardly. But she knew better than to ask. They’d already made it clear that Sokolov’s CV was beyond her need to know. And so far, her attempts to gain access to his file had failed.

She masked her frustration and said, “I understand.”

“Call me back when you’re done,” he told her. “And Larisa?”

“Yes?”

“Get him to like you.”