David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“I need my people to talk to her.”

“I’ll ask Batkin, but I won’t cross him.”

“You cannot hide behind your client.”

“I’m not hiding. Nosferatu doesn’t care about laws or rules of evidence, neither do his bosses. You heard Foos—the guy I saw this morning spent enough time on the WildeTime servers to finger Andras for the BEC worm. Maybe Irina too. That’s why Nosferatu wired that place to blow, taking everyone inside with it—including, as it turns out, me. He’ll know by now he failed—and he’ll be looking for the kids. He won’t be reading them their Miranda rights.”

“That’s not the goddamned point. It’s the cops’ job—my job—now. Can’t you get that through your hairless head?”

The green eyes were afire. For my part, exhaustion and vodka were overcoming good sense.

“I’m beat. Let’s go to bed. Nothing’s going to change in the next few hours. We can pick up the argument in the morning.”

The fire ebbed. “Good idea. Tomorrow is another day.”

“It certainly is.”

It certainly was.

Starting first thing in the morning when, while we were warming up the argument over breakfast, someone tried to assassinate Taras Batkin.

They didn’t get him. And in the confusion, Irina did a runner.

Batkin had his own armored Mercedes. This was New York, not Moscow, but Ibansk knows no formal borders, as Ivanov often points out. Despite the snow that had buried the city, Batkin and Irina emerged early Friday morning. He told me later they were going to church, St. Nicholas, the Russian Orthodox cathedral on East Ninety-seventh Street. That sounded an unlikely destination for either of them, but I didn’t argue the point.

At 7:30, two bodyguards checked the street. It had been plowed twice in the last thirty-six hours, but the asphalt was still covered with a layer of slush and ice, on top of which was two inches of snow. That didn’t stop the guards from calling the driver to bring the car. Usually, the parking space in front of the house was kept clear by the city, and one of the guards would hold the door while two more escorted Batkin from the house across twelve feet of sidewalk into the rolling fortress.

This morning, four feet of packed snow occupied the limousine’s parking spot, deposited there by the Department of Sanitation’s snow plow garbage trucks. Batkin’s bodyguards had hacked a narrow, slush-filled channel from sidewalk to street, not unlike the Gulag laborers who dug Stalin’s canals in the 1930s with exactly the same tools. When the guards checked the street, all they saw were neighbors shoveling the sidewalk. The armored limo pulled up at the end of the snowbank canal. One guard opened the door. Two others brought Batkin and the girl out. As they picked their way toward the car, one “neighbor” to the east and another across the street opened up with mini–Uzi machine pistols hidden beneath their overcoats. The guns fire nine-hundred-fifty rounds a minute, although each magazine holds only thirty-two. It looked like the shooters got off a couple of clips each when I surveyed the damage a few hours later. Two bodyguards died in an instant. Batkin was lucky. He pushed Irina to the ground and his leather-soled Italian loafers slipped on the ice. He ended up on top of her in the slush, bullets pummeling the packed snow all around. One more bodyguard was wounded, and another hit the eastern “neighbor” square in the chest with four nine-millimeter slugs. The other shooter ran for it, the Mercedes in hot pursuit, but the car was as useless as the Potemkin on the slippery pavement. The driver lost control and piled into a row of parked vehicles, totaling two Range Rovers. The man disappeared down Madison Avenue. When Batkin pulled Irina up, she bolted in the other direction. He tried to chase her, but she was hightailing it down Fifth before he got halfway to the corner.

I know how it happened from the news reports—four TV crews, with helicopters, were on the scene in minutes—and from Batkin himself. Once he’d recovered, he called me.

I wasn’t aware of any of this until Foos phoned at 8:50 and said in his usual succinct style, “Better turn on your TV.”

Victoria was explaining the finer points of obstructing justice. To be fair, her concern for me and the law she was sworn to uphold was equally genuine. That didn’t stop it from grating. I hadn’t had near enough sleep to make up for the night spent watching the playhouse, the events of the day and last night’s vodka, which left a dull thudding at the back of my head. I’d hoped the combination of exercise and cold air would clear it away, but the downtown streets were too slippery to run without risking broken bones. I’d settled for a chilly walk around southern Manhattan that cleared nothing. I was in no mood to argue my case over breakfast—aware I didn’t have much of a case to argue. I tried to hide behind the position that I couldn’t do much of anything until I knew more about what was going on, even though I didn’t have any immediate idea how I was going to find that out.

Victoria wasn’t buying any of it, which had her on the subject of obstruction when Foos called.

“Somebody took a shot at your ambassador buddy.”

“He’s not a buddy. You mean shot, like murder shot?”

“I mean a hundred of them. He’s lucky to be alive.”

I turned on the TV and was treated to an aerial view of East Ninety-second Street. Both ends of the block were jammed with police cars. I could see what looked like a limo piled into parked cars on one side. A breathless voice-over announcer recounted sketchy details of the assassination attempt.

“He wants you up there, ASAP,” Foos said.

“Who?”

“The ambassador. Who else?”

“He called?”

“Couple minutes ago. Said your cell phone’s off and to get you a message to meet him at his house as soon as possible.”

“How’d he sound?”

“How do you think? Somebody just tried to kill him. Bad way to start the day.”

Victoria had gone to the bedroom when the phone rang and reappeared wearing one of my black turtlenecks, the core of my winter wardrobe. It was almost big enough to fall off.

“You need some color in your closet. Everything you own is black, gray, or beige.”

“I think you made that point once before.”

“Didn’t take. Like everything else I say. Something besides turtlenecks and T-shirts would be nice too.”

“Cuts down on decisions. Think of all the time I save.”

“So you can get into more trouble. What’s going on?” She pointed at the TV.

“Somebody tried to assassinate Taras Batkin.”

“Jesus! Here?”

“Uh-huh. That’s East Ninety-second Street.”

She approached the TV and stood fixated as the announcer repeated the few facts they had. I poured some coffee and gave her a cup. She barely noticed it was in her hand. When the newscast cut to a commercial, she shook her head and said, “That’s impossible. This is New York.”

“Happens in Moscow all the time.”

“That’s different. That’s… We have rule of law here, goddammit.”

She was angry. This was an attack on her country, and on her, as well as Batkin.

Having no answer, I shook my head. “He wants me to come up there.”

“Who?”

“Batkin.”

“What?! He wants to see you?”

“Foos says he called a few minutes ago.”

“You can’t go up there.”

“Why not?”

“After everything we talked about? He’s a criminal! He’s…”

“That doesn’t mean I am.”

“Don’t you understand anything? After yesterday? And last night? You just keep… I can’t deal with this. I gotta get going. I’ve gotta get out of here.”