Rasputin's Shadow

3

So how’d it go with Gallo?”

Aparo was behind the wheel. We were in his white Dodge Charger, lights strobing and siren wailing, rushing up the FDR on our way to the Midtown Tunnel.

“He’s a prince,” I said, just staring ahead.

Aparo shrugged. “So how long are you going to keep this up?”

“Seriously?” I snapped back. “You too?”

“Hey, come on, buddy,” he protested. “You know I’m with you on this. All the way. But you’ve got to admit, we’ve kind of run out of bullets on this one.”

“There’s always a way.”

“Sure there is. It’s like me and the thirty-six double-D’s in my spinning class.”

“Hang on, you’re doing spinning now?”

He tapped his belly. “I’m down nine pounds in two weeks, amigo. The ladies no likee the blubber.”

Nothing like a fresh divorce to make a guy get back into shape. “And you just discovered that?”

“My point was, this chick,” he continued, “I’m sure she’d rather be kidnapped and sold into slavery off the coast of Sudan than spend a night with me. But does that mean I’m going to give up trying? Of course not. There’s always a way. But then again, we both know how low I’m willing to stoop and how much I’m ready to humiliate myself in my hopeless quest for booty. The question for you, my friend, is: how far are you willing to go to get it done?”

I was asking myself the very same thing.

We soon hit Astoria and our destination was, predictably, a bit of a zoo. Despite how blasé one would expect New Yorkers to be given everything the city’s seen, a public death like that still managed to attract a standing-room-only crowd.

The scene in question was a six-story brick prewar building on a treelined cross-street just off Thirty-first Street. The area had been cordoned off, causing some traffic mayhem, with irate drivers honking their horns and hurling disappointingly unimaginative abuse at one another. Aparo managed to cut through the mess with the assistance of blips from his siren and some deft maneuvering before parking down the block. We made our way past a scattering of media vans and patrol cars and badged through the taped perimeter to get to the first point of interest, the spot where our victim had met his demise. It was on the sidewalk right outside the building, which had a delicately detailed facade that was zigzagged by fire escapes and further defaced by a scattering of air-conditioning units that dotted some of its windows.

The forensics people had put up a large tent over the body to safeguard any evidence from tampering-accidental or otherwise-weather damage, and, of course, to ensure privacy. Judging by the number of people looking down from their windows, I imagined there’d be a lot of canvassing to do and cell-phone photo and video evidence to collect. Canvassing and collecting, because the preliminary info we’d already been given was that the first cops on the scene had quickly ascertained that the dead man had come through a closed window before plummeting down to the sidewalk.

Suicide jumpers tended to open the window first.

My other question-why we were being called out to a potential murder in Queens, when that’s pretty much the local homicide squad’s exact job description-was also easily answered. The victim was a diplomat.

A Russian diplomat.

As we approached, I looked up and saw a couple of guys leaning out a window on the top floor of the building, directly above the tent. They were probably the local investigators. It was a safe bet they wouldn’t be too pleased to see us. Also, it looked like our victim had missed the trees on his way down, which didn’t bode well for what shape his body would be in.

Aparo and I stopped at the tent door. There was a handful of forensic technicians busily taking pictures and collecting samples and doing all the geeky things they do. I asked for the coroner. He was still there, waiting for the green light to whisk the body away to his windowless lair, and stepped out of the geek scrum. As we hadn’t met before, we introduced ourselves. His name was Lucas Harding and he had the same unnervingly casual demeanor all medical examiners seemed to have.

Harding invited us into his fiefdom. We slipped some paper booties over our shoes, donned the requisite rubber gloves, and followed him in.

It was not a pretty sight.

No body that flew down six stories onto a concrete sidewalk ever was.

I’d only ever seen one similar corpse in my day from a big fall like that, and although I’ve witnessed my fair share of blood and gore, it was a sight I’d never forgotten. The sheer fragility of our bodies is something most of us tend to ignore, but nothing brought that fragility rocketing into focus with such brutal clarity like seeing someone sprawled on the sidewalk like that.

Despite a skull that was so pulverized it looked like it had been made out of plasticine before some giant baby had squashed it out of shape, it was still clear that we were looking at a white male adult with dark, short hair, somewhere in his thirties and in good shape, at least before the fall. He was dressed in a dark blue suit that was perforated in a couple of places-below his left elbow, and by his right shoulder-by shattered bones that had ripped through the cloth. There was a big puddle of coagulated blood around his head, and another to the left of his body, where it followed the slight angle in the sidewalk before pooling in a big crack in the concrete. Most gruesome, however, was his jaw. It seemed to have taken a direct hit and had been wrenched out of place, and was hanging off to one side like an oversized helmet chin strap that had been flicked off.

There were also shards of broken glass around the body that we avoided stepping on.

Harding noticed me glancing at them.

“Yeah, the glass matches what the body’s telling us,” the coroner offered. “The arms are consistent with him extending them to try and break his fall. Pointless, of course, but instinctive. And it confirms he was alive and conscious when he fell. The position where he landed in relation to the edge of the building also fits the story. Suicide jumpers tend to just drop down. No one does it enthusiastically; it’s not like they’re leaping off a diving board. They usually just step off a ledge, and if that were the case, I’d have expected him to land a few feet closer to the base of the building than he did. This guy left the building with some momentum. If this sidewalk hadn’t been as wide as it is, he’d have landed on someone’s car.”

“Do we have a positive ID?” I asked.

Harding nodded. “First responders got it off his wallet. Hang on, I have it here.” He flicked a page back on his notepad and found it. “Name’s Fyodor Yakovlev. It was confirmed by the rep from the Russian embassy who’s around here somewhere.”

“Confirmed, as in he knew him?”

“She knew him,” Harding corrected.

“What was the time of death?” Aparo asked.

“Eight twenty, give or take a minute or two,” Harding said. “He almost hit a couple of pedestrians. They were the first to call it in.”

I checked my watch and knew what Aparo was getting at. It was almost eleven. Our victim had died around two and a half hours ago. Which meant that if this was a murder-which seemed kind of obvious at the moment-it meant we were coming to the party late, which was not an ideal place to start.

I looked around, then asked what had become the key question in a situation like this. “Did you find a cell phone on him? Or anywhere around?”

The coroner’s face scrunched up curiously. “No, at least, not on him. And no one’s handed anything in.”

Not great. But there were ways for us to recover what he had on his phone, once we had the number. Assuming the Russians gave it to us, which was unlikely, given that he was a diplomat. “We need to make sure the area’s properly searched in case it fell out of him on the way down.”

“I’ll get the guys to do another trawl.”

We finished up with the coroner, left the tent, and headed into the building.

As we walked into the lobby, I noticed that there was a voice intercom by the front door, but no security camera. The lobby area was tired, but clean. No CCTV cameras in there that I could see, though I didn’t expect there to be any in that building. There was a grid of lockable mailboxes on the wall to our right, some with names and others with just apartment numbers on them. We were going up to 6E. It was one of the ones that didn’t have a name on it.

We rode the rumbling elevator to the top floor and were greeted by a uniform as we stepped out. The landing had three apartments on it, with 6E being the one farthest to the left. I imagined the immediate neighbors would have already been interviewed, although given the time of day it had happened, some of them may have already been at work.

We stepped into the apartment. The place was dark and had a kind of faded grandeur to it. Like many of the better prewars, it had some charming, old-world features-thick hardwood floors, high ceilings, arched doorways, and elaborate crown moldings… stuff you didn’t get in newer buildings. Its décor-all dark wood and floral and lacy and cluttered with knickknacks-even its smell instantly conveyed a strong sense of history. Its occupants had obviously been living there for many years. A framed photo on a side table in the foyer fit the place’s aura perfectly. It showed a smiling couple in their mid-sixties, posing in front of some great natural arch, the kind you find in national parks out west. The man in the picture, short and round-faced and with a thin tuft of white hair around his balding pate, was clearly not the dead man downstairs. On the wall above it hung a trio of antique religious icons, classical depictions of Mary and a baby Jesus painted on small slabs of cracked wood.

There was also a woman’s magazine on the side table, where one would normally leave the mail. I noted the name on its subscription mailing label-Daphne Sokolov.

The foyer led to the living room, where three guys-two suits and a uniform-and a woman were standing and chatting by the shattered window that looked out on to the street. It was immediately obvious there’d been a tussle of some kind in the room, as attested to by the broken coffee table, shattered vase, and flowers strewn on the carpet by the window.

Quick intros informed us the suits were indeed the detectives from the 114th Precinct, Neal Giordano and Dick Adams. The uniform was an officer by the name of Andy Zombanakis, also from the 114th. The three of them looked put out, which was likely, given that they’d probably been told to wait there for us and hand over what they no doubt considered to be their investigation. They also looked annoyed, like Aparo and I had somehow intruded on their little get-together. That was even more understandable and likely due to the lady they were conversing with, who looked out of place until she introduced herself as Larisa Tchoumitcheva, there on behalf of the Russian consulate.

She was gorgeous. Almost my height in three-inch heels, slim but with rolling curves that challenged the tailored navy blue skirt suit and white shirt she was in, and the wickedest combo of lips and blue eyes I’d ever seen, the lot topped by perfectly coiffed light auburn hair that fittingly veered more toward fiery red than stately brown. I flicked a glance at my newly single partner and could just visualize the wet ’n’ wild clips that were unspooling in his lecherous mind. In this instance, it was hard to blame him. Any man would have had a hard time keeping them in check.

Ever the perfect gentleman, I told her, “I’m sorry for your loss. Did you know him?”

“Not really,” she replied. “I met him briefly at some official functions, but our duties didn’t really intersect.”

She spoke with the barest hint of a Slavic accent. And as if she needed it, her voice only made her more attractive.

Focus.

“Who was he?”

“Fyodor Yakovlev. He was Third Secretary for Maritime Affairs at the consulate here.”

Maritime Affairs. I hadn’t come across that one yet.

I asked her, “And you? You said your duties didn’t intersect.”

She fished a card out from an inside pocket of her jacket and handed it to me. I read the small letters under her name out loud. “‘Counselor for Public Affairs.’”

Well, at least it didn’t say “attaché.”

I left the words hanging there and looked up from the card. Our eyes met and I just gave her a small, knowing grin. She obviously read me and my suspicions, but didn’t seem fazed by it at all. It was a dance I’d danced before with, among others, Chinese, French, and Israeli “diplomats.” But most of all, it was the Russians who never stopped hogging that particular ballroom.

The one for spies.