“Anything else, Oleg?” Reilly asked.
“We continue to interview people with knowledge of the deceased.” Followed by a shrug.
He offended the wrong people,” an informant said, with a shrug of his own that showed how absurdly obvious the answer to the preceding question was. How else could a person of Avseyenko’s stature turn up dead in so spectacular a way?
“And what people are they?” the militiaman asked, not expecting a meaningful answer, but you asked the question anyway because you didn’t know what the answer was until you did.
“His colleagues from State Security,” the informant suggested.
“Oh?”
“Who else could have killed him in that way? One of his girls would have used a knife. A business rival from the street would have used a pistol or a larger knife, but an RPG… be serious, where does one get one of those?”
He wasn’t the first to voice that thought, of course, though the local police did have to allow for the fact that all manner of weapons, heavy and light, had escaped one way or another from the coffers of what had once been called the Red Army into the active marketplace of criminal weapons.
“So, do you have any names for us?” the militia sergeant asked.
“Not a name, but I know the face. He’s tall and powerfully built, like a soldier, reddish hair, fair skin, some freckles left over from his youth, green eyes.” The informant paused. “His friends call him ‘the boy,’ because his appearance is so youthful. He was State Security once, but not a spy and not a catcher of spies. He was something else there, but I am not sure what.”
The militia sergeant started taking more precise notes at this point, his pencil marks far more legible and much darker on the yellow page.
“And this man was displeased with Avseyenko?”
“So I have heard.”
“And the reason for his displeasure?”
“That I do not know, but Gregoriy Filipovich had a way of offending men. He was very skilled at handling women, of course. For that he had a true gift, but the gift did not translate into his dealings with men. Many thought him a zhopnik, but he was not one of those, of course. He had a different woman on his arm every night, and none of them were ugly, but for some reason he didn’t get along well with men, even those from State Security, where, he said, he was once a great national asset.”
“Is that a fact,” the militia sergeant observed, bored again. If there was anything criminals liked to do, it was boast. He’d heard it all a thousand times or more.
“Oh, yes. Gregoriy Filipovich claims to have supplied mistresses for all manner of foreigners, including some of ministerial rank, and says that they continue to supply valuable information to Mother Russia. I believe it,” the informer added, editorializing again. “For a week with one of those angels, I would speak much.”
And who wouldn’t? the militiaman wondered with a yawn. “So, how did Avseyenko offend such powerful men?” the cop asked again.
“I have told you I do not know. Talk to ‘the boy,’ perhaps he will know.”
“It is said that Gregoriy was beginning to import drugs,” the cop said next, casting his hook into a different hole, and wondering what fish might lurk in the still waters.
The informant nodded. “That is true. It was said. But I never saw any evidence of it.”
“Who would have seen evidence of it?”
Another shrug. “This I do not know. One of his girls, perhaps. I never understood how he planned to distribute what he thought about importing. To use the girls was logical, of course, but dangerous for them— and for him, because his whores would not have been loyal to him in the face of a trip to the camps. So, then, what does that leave?” the informant asked rhetorically. “He would have to set up an entirely new organization, and there were also dangers in doing that, were there not? So, yes, I believe he was thinking about importing drugs for sale, and making vast sums of money from it, but Gregoriy was not a man who wished to go to a prison, and I think he was merely thinking about it, perhaps talking a little, but not much. I do not think he had made his final decision. I do not think he actually imported anything before he met his end.”
“Rivals with the same ideas?” the cop asked next.
“There are people who can find cocaine and other drugs for you, as you well know.”
The cop looked up. In fact, the militia sergeant didn’t know that for certain. He’d heard rumbles and rumors, but not statements of fact from informants he trusted (insofar as any cop in any city truly trusted any informant). As with many things, there was a buzz on the streets of Moscow, but like most Moscow cops he expected it to show up first in the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city whose criminal activity went back to the czars and which today, with the restoration of free trade with the rest of the world, tended to lead Russia in— well, led Russia to all forms of illicit activity. If there was an active drug trade in Moscow, it was so new and so small that he hadn’t stumbled across it yet. He made a mental note to check with Odessa, to see what if anything was happening down there along those lines.
“And what people might they be?” the sergeant asked. If there was a growing distribution network in Moscow, he might as well learn about it.
Nomuri’s job for Nippon Electric Company involved selling high-end desktop computers and peripherals. For him that meant the PRC government, whose senior bureaucrats had to have the newest and best of everything, from cars to mistresses, paid for in all cases by the government, which in turn took its money from the people, whom the bureaucrats represented and protected to the best of their abilities. As in many things, the PRC could have bought American brands, but in this case it chose to purchase the slightly less expensive (and less capable) computers from Japan, in the same way that it preferred to buy Airbus airlines from the European maker rather than Boeings from America— that had been a card played a few years before to teach the Americans a lesson. America had briefly resented it, then had quickly forgotten about it, in the way America seemed to handle all such slights, which was quite a contrast to the Chinese, who never forgot anything.
When President Ryan had announced the reestablishment of their official recognition of the Republic of China government on Taiwan, the repercussions had thundered through the corridors of power in Beijing like the main shocks of a major earthquake. Nomuri hadn’t been here, long enough yet to see the cold fury the move had generated, but the aftershocks were significant enough, and he’d heard echoes of it since his arrival in Beijing. The questions directed at himself were sometimes so direct and so demanding of an explanation that he’d momentarily wondered if his cover might have been blown, and his interlocutors had known that he was a CIA “illegal” field officer in the capital of the People’s Republic of China, entirely without a diplomatic cover. But it hadn’t been that. It was just a continuing echo of pure political rage. Paradoxically, the Chinese government was itself trying to shove that rage aside because they, too, had to do business with the United States of America, now their number-one trading partner, and the source of vast amounts of surplus cash, which their government needed to do the things which Nomuri was tasked to find out about. And so, here he was, in the outer office of one of the nation’s senior officials.
“Good day,” he said, with a bow and a smile to the secretary. She worked for a senior minister named Fang Gan, he knew, whose office was close by. She was surprisingly well dressed for a semi-ordinary worker, in a nation where fashion statements were limited to the color of the buttons one wore on the Mao jacket that was as much a part of the uniform of civilian government workers as was the gray-green wool of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.
“Good day,” the young lady said in reply. “Are you Nomuri?”
“Yes, and you are…?”
“Lian Ming,” the secretary replied.
An interesting name, Chester thought. “Lian” in Mandarin meant “graceful willow.” She was short, like most Chinese women, with a square-ish face and dark eyes. Her least attractive feature was her hair, short and cut in a manner that harkened back to the worst of the 1950s in America, and then only for children in Appalachian trailer parks. For all that, it was a classically Chinese face in its ethnicity, and one much favored in this tradition-bound nation. The look in her eyes, at least, suggested intelligence and education.