Robert Knightly - The cold room

But there was traffic up on the bridge, bakery and newspaper delivery vans and yellow cabs just beginning their twelve-hour shifts. I trailed behind, in the right lane, ignoring the astonishingly bright lights of an eighteen-wheeler that didn’t slow down until it came to within a yard of my rear bumper. I ignored the blast of its air horn, too, and the driver’s upraised finger as he fell back.

‘Thick skin,’ I remembered an old partner telling me. ‘That’s how you do it. That’s how you get through the day. Nothing in, nothing out. Keep it from the wife, keep it from the kids.’

I got out of bed at ten o’clock, after five hours’ sleep, and set a pot of coffee to brewing. Then I quickly showered and shaved. Though I couldn’t be sure that Aslan was contemplating a move — or that he wasn’t already in the wind — the need for haste was obvious enough.

At ten thirty, I dialed the number of INS Agent Dominick Capra. He picked up on the third ring.

‘Dominick, it’s Harry Corbin. You remember, we had lunch at Pete’s Tavern.’

‘Hey, Harry,’ Capra said, ‘how’s it goin’?’

‘Can’t whine. How about yourself? You put away any foreign gangsters this week?’

‘We don’t put ’em away, Harry. We just send them back where they came from. So, what’s up?’

‘Chechens, Dominick. Chechens are up. Or one particular Chechen, named Aslan Khalid, who used to have a Russian business partner named Konstantine Barsakov.’

‘Used to?’

‘Barsakov’s dead, but that’s not what I’m calling about. I always thought that Chechens and Russians hated each other.’

Capra took a minute to consider the statement. I could almost hear the little wheels turning.

‘First thing,’ he finally said, his good-old-boy tone conspicuously absent, ‘Khalid is not a Chechen family name. Chechen family names sound like Russian names. Second thing, there’s no Chechen immigration quota. Chechnya is a province of Russia. If your man’s here legally, he came in under the Russian quota. Third, Chechnya has been penetrated by jihadists from everywhere in the Middle East, so the only way a Chechen could enter the United States under the Russian quota is if the Russian government intervened to get his application approved.’

‘I saw Khalid’s green card, Dominick. It seemed legit to me.’

‘What was his country of origin?’

‘Russia.’

‘Well?’

I gave it a couple of seconds, than got to the point. ‘Aslan’s vanished and I need to find him,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d run his name through your database. If he’s here legally, he has to have a sponsor. I’d like to know that sponsor’s name.’

This time Capra took so long to respond that I thought we were disconnected.

‘Dominick?’

‘Yeah, I’m here.’

‘Well?’

‘Harry, listen close to what I’m sayin’. I feel the dead hand of higher-ups in this business. You’ve grabbed a buzzsaw, but gettin’ cut is not on my list of priorities. Not only will I not do this little favor for you, I don’t want you to call me again. Comprende?’

Chastened, I refilled my coffee mug before making a series of phone calls, to the Department of Finance, The Motor Vehicle Bureau, and the Department of Consumer Affairs. My hope was to connect Aslan to Domestic Solutions, but the calls were unproductive. Finance told me that Domestic Solutions was not incorporated and had never paid taxes of any kind. Motor Vehicles told me that the Econoline’s registration had been signed by Konstantine Barsakov. Consumer Affairs told me that Domestic Solution was unlicensed.

I’m not terribly superstitious, but I’d had enough of the telephone by then. I walked to the living-room window and stood for a moment, looking out on a playground overrun with screaming children. For the past week, the playground had been deserted because of the heat, so whatever the kids had been doing, they’d been doing it indoors. Now all that pent-up energy was pouring out.

The children were in constant motion, running from one apparatus to another, barely pausing to interact.

A few minutes later, I fired up the computer in my office and went back to work. Aslan Khalid had issued a personal challenge to me when he posed Barsakov in front of the Chechen flag. This was a display of ego I could certainly use against him. As for the challenge itself, the case became personal for me when I rolled Jane Doe over and saw what was done to her. I didn’t need additional motivation.

I jumped from my server to Google, typed in Chechnya, got 892,000 hits. For the next hour, I bounced from website to website, covering no more than twenty. At one, I discovered a version of Aslan’s flag. At another, a history of rebellion that stretched back to 1785 when a Russian army swept south to engulf Chechnya, at the time a virtually autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. In 1944, a fed up Josef Stalin deported the entire population to the gulags in Kazakhstan. In 1959, a conciliatory Nikita Khrushchev allowed their return. The struggle for independence continued throughout. Not even the 1994 assault on the capitol of Grozny, an attack which left the city looking much like Berlin at the end of World War Two, was sufficient to stop it.

It was all very noble and I found myself in sympathy with the Chechen people. Still, the past ten years had seen a pair of troubling developments. After the rebels were driven out of the capitol and into the hills, Chechnya had been penetrated by Arab jihadists offering money, arms, and a concept of struggle that led to the mass slaughter of Russian school children. At the same time, in the absence of any rule of law, a criminal class had emerged. According to an article in Le Monde, Chechnya had become a trans-shipment point for everything from Afghani morphine headed for Europe to stolen BMWs headed for Thailand. Kidnappings for ransom were an everyday occurrence, even now that the Russians had consolidated what passed for a victory by installing a sadistic butcher named Ramzan Khadyrov as president.

I took a break at noon to stand beside the kitchen window while I ate a slightly overripe nectarine and collected my thoughts. According to Dominick Capra, Aslan couldn’t be in the country legally unless somebody in the Russian government requested a favor of somebody in the United States government. If so, it must have been a very big favor. Aslan’s description of the Russian assault on Grozny was too graphic to be entirely rehearsed. Almost certainly, he’d been there, in his mid-twenties, involved in the fighting. Was he already working for the Russians? Or was he originally a freedom fighter?

That was as far as I got before the phone began to ring. I knew it was from Adele before I picked it up. Adele was the only one who called these days.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘how’d it go?’

I spelled it out for her, summarizing the facts, my tone neutral. On the prior night, just before I fell asleep, I’d come to a conclusion: I could not have reasonably anticipated the events leading to Barsakov’s release. Neither the presence of Monica Baird, nor the arrival of Barsakov’s lawyer, nor Drew Millard’s chickenshit decision. Any one, or even two, of these elements would not have been enough to spring Konstantine. It took all three.

But if my plan had been sound, that didn’t mean it was the only plan on the table. Far from it.

‘What you might have done,’ Adele pointed out, ‘was take a photo of Barsakov and show it to the witness first. That way, you’d be charging him with murder.’

I was quick to reply. ‘For that matter, I could have brought Clyde with me on the surveillance, let him ID Barsakov right there, then obtained search warrants before Aslan knew I existed. Or even better, I could have held off on serving the warrants until the women came back to Greenpoint on Saturday evening. Hell, by that time, I might have gotten warrants for them too.’