David Duffy - Last to Fold

He’d been sloppy ten years ago. Uncharacteristically so. Now he was paying for his negligence. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Six fifteen A.M., eighty-five degrees, the air heavy enough to hold in my hands. I wake up at six, no matter what—a habit I’ve never been able to break. I live on South Street in what was once a warehouse serving the seaport two blocks north. The seaport is now a tourist attraction, and the warehouse had long fallen into disuse when enterprising artists converted its big, open floors into studios and residences. Initially they were illegal, but as with hundreds of loft buildings in New York, that eventually got sorted out, thanks to a lot of hard work, some legal wrangling, and a few envelopes filled with cash. In 1996, I moved in two years after it became kosher. In recent years, my neighbors who’ve been there since the beginning have started to acknowledge me.

I own half the sixth floor in the back, away from the noise of the elevated FDR Drive, which passes outside our door. My windows face south and west into the canyons of Wall Street. I’ve kept the space mostly open—living area, bedroom, guest room, and baths in twenty-two hundred square feet—a reaction to the cramped quarters of my childhood. It’s still more a commercial neighborhood than a residential one, but that doesn’t bother me. I like the solitude, especially at night. Another reaction.

I stretched outside the building in my running clothes and an old painter’s hat. I took off to the south, picking up speed for the first half mile before settling into my normal gait, thinking about Polina, Ratko Rislyakov, and whether Marko and company had figured a way out of Jersey City.

I did one of my five-mile loops, this one down through Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan and up the west side along the Hudson to Greenwich Village, where I turned east through the quiet cobbled streets all the way across the island before heading south again and home. I try to run at least five days a week, regardless of weather, although days like this make me question my resolve if not my sanity. On alternate mornings I take a shorter route and stop at the gym to work the weights.

I arrived back in the neighborhood hot, soaked, and possibly enlightened—I had an idea where I’d seen Rislyakov’s name. I used to cool off strolling the Fulton Fish Market down the street, taking in the seafood and the characters who worked there, but the market’s moved up to the Bronx, and only a lingering fishy smell remains. They’ll have to tear up the asphalt to get rid of that. Today, I just walked around the block a couple of times and bought a bagel at the deli. I met Tina in the lobby, filling out her top beautifully, as she always did.

“Off to work,” she chirped. Too bad. Well, it was a lousy day for sunbathing.

I showered quickly, poured some coffee, and logged on to Ibansk.com. I paused to read Ivanov’s latest post. It started with his signature rant about how the Cheka, “the state within a state,” had taken over the state itself, along with everything else, as Vladimir Putin and Iakov Barsukov “dispatched Cheka operatives throughout the government, industrial, and criminal structures of Ibansk with the mission of throttling democracy, corrupting free enterprise, and coddling crooks. Most important, wrapping Cheka hands tight around any strings worth pulling.”

Ivanov’s keyboard spews acid—he makes no attempt to be balanced. That’s one reason he’s as popular as he is. Power run amok—especially Cheka power—is unmitigated evil, in his single-minded opinion, and the only defense left is holding it up to the bright light of the blog. I don’t always agree, but it’s hard to argue with his basic premise. The fact is, the Cheka does pull about every string worth pulling in Russia these days, and has since the fall of the Yeltsin government. One of these strings is the regular media, all but entirely state controlled. Ivanov and a few others are lone voices trying to tell what they see as the truth in a thoroughly hostile environment. Truth, even imperfect truth, gave Ivanov a voice of authority. In a land where the official voice lied with impunity—confident that no one would notice or care—Ivanov shouted, “Pay attention!” as loud and long as he could. He screamed the truth as he saw it, just as Zinoviev, his Soviet-era predecessor, had done.

Where Ivanov and I part company is the subject of Iakov Barsukov. To Ivanov, he’s the personification of Cheka malfeasance, Putin’s chief henchman in the inexorable extension of Cheka control. He may not be totally wrong about that—but to me, Iakov’s the man who plucked me from the living hell of my adolescence, recognized a talent, and gave me a chance for a career and a real life. Without him, I doubt I’d have made twenty. Even with everything that happened later—to me, to him, to our families, to our friendship—it’s hard to turn against a man like that.

Ivanov had news.

We hear that illness stalks the Barsukov clan—although confederation might be a more accurate term these days, as time, disagreement, and even accusations of disloyalty have driven the various members of the ferret family in diverse directions. Will the threat of mortality heal old wounds as it opens new ones?

Iakov, père, of course, suffers from advanced age—something few Russians experience—and perennial bronchitis. Now son Lachko has been laid low with cancer of the esophagus. The result of a lifelong love of papirosi —or a sign from heaven that enough is enough? Ivanov is not privy to the thinking of the celestial authorities, but he can always hope.

The Badger brothers, Lachko and Vasily, are Ibansk’s leading criminals. Vasily runs the rackets here in the old country with sharp claws and bloody teeth. Lachko was dispatched to New York when his checkered Cheka career—once destined for the pinnacle of Lubyanka—came to its ignominious end. Even those less cynical than Ivanov could question the wisdom of installing an officer once accused of smuggling, theft, and embezzlement as chief of the FSB’s Investigations Directorate, but consistency and common sense have never been Cheka hallmarks. Nepotism, on the other hand…

Ivanov digresses. One thing is certain. Even the most powerful Chekist cannot outrun the clock. Time numbers their days. How many more does Lachko have? Ivanov has the best sources in Ibansk, but that has yet to be confided.

He can hope, however.

I scrolled back through Ivanov’s blog, looking for an old post. I stopped here and there to skim diatribes on the Cheka and the Barsukovs, making sure they added nothing to my current knowledge. Ibansk.com was a way to check in on a world I’d left behind and planned to continue to leave behind. Now, thanks in part to Ivanov himself, that world had jumped years of time, a continent, and an ocean to land here, today. Polina, Lachko, even the Cheka, all seemed to be chasing me down. How long before Ivanov started calling the race? After last night, on another sweaty New York morning, the world I was living in was feeling more and more like Fucktown.

I kept scrolling and found what I was looking for, back in early May.

One of Ibansk’s more colorful, up-and-coming criminals (God knows, we have up-and-comers aplenty) has suddenly dropped from the scene.

In the all-night-world all over Ibansk, from Moscow’s chanson clubs to Mayfair’s casinos to New York’s oh-so-hip (or should that be SoHo hip?) city-that-never-sleeps nightspots, the young and the reckless, feckless but rarely checkless, are asking the same question—Where’s Ratko?