“Truly?”
“Oh, yes. My mother ruled the house until she died.”
“Interesting. Are you religious?”
Why that question? Chet wondered.
“I have never decided between Shinto and Zen Buddhism,” he replied, truthfully. He’d been baptized a Methodist, but fallen away from his church many years before. In Japan he’d examined the local religions just to understand them, the better to fit in, and though he’d learned much about both, neither had appealed to his American upbringing. “And you?”
“I once looked into Falun Gong, but not seriously. I had a friend who got very involved. He’s in prison now.”
“Ah, a pity.” Nomuri nodded sympathy, wondering how close the friend had been. Communism remained a jealous system of belief, intolerant of competition of any sort. Baptists were the new religious fad, springing up as if from the very ground itself, started off, he thought, from the Internet, a medium into which American Christians, especially Baptists and Mormons, had pumped a lot of resources of late. And so Jerry Falwell was getting some sort of religious/ideological foothold here? How remarkable— or not. The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and also with Mao it would seem, was that as fine as the theoretical model was, it lacked something the human soul craved. But the communist chieftains didn’t and couldn’t like that very much. The Falun Gong group hadn’t even been a religion at all, not to Nomuri’s way of thinking, but for some reason he didn’t fully understand, it had frightened the powers that be in the PRC enough to crack down on it as if it had been a genuinely counterrevolutionary political movement. He heard that the convicted leaders of the group were doing seriously hard time in the local prisons. The thought of what constituted especially hard time in this country didn’t bear much contemplation. Some of the world’s most vicious tortures had been invented in this country, where the value of human life was a far less important thing than in the nation of his origin, Chet reminded himself. China was an ancient land with an ancient culture, but in many ways these people might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings, so detached were their societal values from what Chester Nomuri had grown up with. “Well, I really don’t have much in the way of religious convictions.”
“Convictions?” Ming asked.
“Beliefs,” the CIA officer corrected. “So, are there any men in your life? A fiancé, perhaps?”
She sighed. “No, not in some time.”
“Indeed? I find that surprising,” Nomuri observed with studied gallantry.
“I suppose we are different from Japan,” Ming admitted, with just a hint of sadness in her voice.
Nomuri lifted the flask and poured some more mao-tai for both. “In that case,” he said, with a smile and a raised eyebrow, “I offer you a friendly drink.”
“Thank you, Nomuri-san.”
“My pleasure, Comrade Ming.” He wondered how long it would take. Perhaps not too long at all. Then the real work would begin.
C H A P T E R – 7
Developing Leads
It was the sort of coincidence for which police work is known worldwide. Provalov called militia headquarters, and since he was investigating a homicide, he got to speak with the St. Petersburg murder squad leader, a captain. When he said he was looking for some former Spetsnaz soldiers, the captain remembered his morning meeting in which two of his men had reported finding two bodies bearing possible Spetsnaz tattoos, and that was enough to make him forward the call.
“Really, the RPG event in Moscow?” Yevgeniy Petrovich Ustinov asked. “Who exactly was killed?”
“The main target appears to have been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko. He was a pimp,” Provalov told his colleague to the north. “Also his driver and one of his girls, but they appear to have been inconsequential.” He didn’t have to elaborate. You didn’t use an antitank rocket to kill a chauffeur and a whore.
“And your sources tell you that two Spetsnaz veterans did the shooting?”
“Correct, and they flew back to St. Petersburg soon thereafter.”
“I see. Well, we fished two such people from the River Neva yesterday, both in their late thirties or so, and both shot in the back of the head.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. We have fingerprints from both bodies. We’re waiting for Central Army Records to match them up. But that will nor he very fast.”
“Let me see what I can do about that, Yevgeniy Petrovich. You see, also present at the murder was Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, and we have concerns that he might have been the true target of the killing.”
“That would be ambitious,” Ustinov observed coolly. “Perhaps your friends at Dzerzhinskiy Square can get the records morons moving?”
“I will call them and see,” Provalov promised.
“Good, anything else?”
“Another name, Suvorov, Klementi Ivan’ch, reportedly a former KGB officer, but that is all I have at the moment. Does the name mean anything to you?” You could hear the man shaking his head over the phone, Provalov noted.
“Nyet, never heard that one,” the senior detective replied as he wrote it down. “Connection?”
“My informant thinks he’s the man who arranged the killing.”
“I’ll check our records here to see if we have anything on him. Another former ‘Sword and Shield’ man, eh? How many of those guardians of the state have gone bad?” the St. Petersburg cop asked rhetorically.
“Enough,” his colleague in Moscow agreed, with an unseen grimace.
“This Avseyenko fellow, also KGB?”
“Yes, he reportedly ran the Sparrow School.”
Ustinov chuckled at that one. “Oh, a state-trained pimp. Marvelous. Good girls?”
“Lovely,” Provalov confirmed. “More than we can afford.”
“A real man doesn’t have to pay for it, Oleg Gregoriyevich,” the St. Petersburg cop assured his Moscow colleague.
“That is true, my friend. At least not until long afterwards,” Provalov added.
“That is the truth!” A laugh. “Let me know what you find out?”
“Yes, I will fax you my notes.”
“Excellent. I will share my information with you as well,” Ustinov promised. There is a bond among homicide investigators across the world. No country sanctions the private taking of human life. Nation-states reserve such power for themselves alone.
In his dreary Moscow office, Lieutenant Provalov made his notes for several minutes. It was too late to call the RVS about rattling the Central Army Records cage. First thing in the morning, he promised himself. Then it was time to leave. He picked his coat off the tree next to his desk and headed out to where his official car was parked. This he drove to a corner close to the American Embassy, and a place called Boris Godunov’s, a friendly and warm bar. He’d only been there for five minutes when a familiar hand touched his shoulder.
“Hello, Mishka,” Provalov said, without turning.
“You know, Oleg, it’s good to see that Russian cops are like American cops.”
“It is the same in New York?”
“You bet,” Reilly confirmed. “After a long day of chasing bad guys, what’s better than a few drinks with your pals?” The FBI agent waved to the bartender for his usual, a vodka and soda. “Besides, you get some real work done in a place like this. So, anything happening on the Pimp Case?”
“Yes, the two who did the killing may have shown up dead in St. Petersburg.” Provalov tossed down the last of his straight vodka and filled the American in on the details, concluding, “What do you make of that?”
“Either it’s revenge or insurance, pal. I’ve seen it happen at home.”
“Insurance?”
“Yeah, had it happen in New York. The Mafia took Joey Gallo out, did it in public, and they wanted it to be a signature event, so they got a black hood to do the hit— but then the poor bastard gets shot himself about fifteen feet away. Insurance, Oleg. That way the subject can’t tell anybody who asked him to take the job. The second shooter just walked away, never did get a line on him. Or it could have been a revenge hit: whoever paid them to do the job whacked them for hitting the wrong target. You pays your money and you takes your choice, pal.”
“How do you say, wheels within wheels?”
Reilly nodded. “That’s how we say it. Well, at least it gives you some more leads to run down. Maybe your two shooters talked to somebody. Hell, maybe they even kept a diary.” It was like tossing a rock into a pond, Reilly thought. The ripples just kept expanding in a case like this. Unlike a nice domestic murder, where a guy whacked his wife for fucking around, or serving dinner late, and then confessed while crying his eyes out at what he’d done. But by the same token, it was an awfully loud crime, and those, more often than not, were the ones you broke because people commented on the noise, and some of those people knew things that you could use. It was just a matter of getting people out on the street, rattling doorknobs and wearing out shoes, until you got what you needed. These Russian cops weren’t dumb. They lacked some of the training that Reilly took for granted, but for all that, they had the proper cop instincts, and the fact of the matter was that if you followed the proper procedures, you’d break your cases, because the other side wasn’t all that smart. The smart ones didn’t break the law in so egregious a way. No, the perfect crime was the one you never discovered, the murder victim you never found, the stolen funds missed by bad accounting procedures, the espionage never discovered. Once you knew a crime had been committed, you had a starting place, and it was like unraveling a sweater. There wasn’t all that much holding the wool together if you just kept picking at it.