David Duffy - Last to Fold

Millions of Russians are just like me. The fact that we’re all victims of a calculated, state-sanctioned system of betrayal does nothing to relieve our shame and disgust. We can’t even feel any kinship with our fellow zeks. None of us wants to recognize a fellow traveler—if we do, we admit our complicity in the horrors of our Gulag pasts. The complicit victim. The Soviets’ greatest irony. Stalin’s enduring legacy.

I spent two decades running from my childhood inside the very organization that did so much to shape it. I’ve spent another trying to find freedom in a foreign land where we’re all told, repeatedly, we can be anything we want to be. Even so, like anyone, I’m a prisoner of the past, as surely as I was born an inmate of the Gulag. I’ve yet to find freedom from either.

Bemoaning fate was getting me nowhere, as usual, so I spent the rest of the ride making a mental list of things out of whack—right here, right now, today. Polina/Felix hiding out on Fifth Avenue. Ratko Risly kidnapping Eva Mulholland. Eva’s cooperation. Barsukov’s fear about Ratko. Sasha, a low-level FSB archivist, whose only crime was helping people like me find out what happened to their families, locked in a cell, serving as leverage for something Lachko knew I couldn’t deliver. As we came out of the tunnel, I thought about my options. The only one that made any sense was going back to Greene Street.

Sergei left me outside the office at 6:30. He hadn’t said a word. I walked around to the sidewalk. His window slid down. He dropped the manila envelope on the pavement.

“Boss said you forgot this. He also said, ‘ Oo ti bya, galava, kak, oon a bizyanie jopuh —your face looks like a monkey’s ass.’”

The window rose as he sped away. I took the envelope upstairs. Foos was nowhere to be seen. Pig Pen was sleeping. I dialed Gina’s number.

“Sorry I stood you up.”

“What happened to you? I waited as long as I could, but I had to split at six twenty. I was late as it was.”

“Thanks. Not your fault. You see anyone?”

“Guy, girl, and an older guy.”

“Together?”

“No. Guy came first, at four fifteen. Girl at ten to six, and the older guy just before I left, six ten.”

“Describe them.”

“Girl’s tall and thin, about five-nine. Probably eighteen, nineteen years old. Reddish-brown hair, real blue eyes. Great skin, you see that, even across the street. Hot figure, could be a model.”

I’d seen a picture of someone who looked like that, tied up with a gun to her head. Eva Mulholland.

“She looked kind of nervous,” Gina said.

“Strung out?”

“Maybe. More furtive, jumpy. Like she’s afraid someone’s gonna take something away from her.”

“The guy?”

“Medium height. Medium build. Brown hair, expensive cut. Good-looking, slightly pudgy, big nose. Dressed in black. Had a suitcase, one of those rollers, and a messenger bag.”

“Look like Dustin Hoffman?”

“Yeah, when he was younger.”

“The older guy?”

“Seventy, maybe seventy-five. White hair, tall, maybe six-four. Thin as can be. Wearing a suit—you don’t see many of those in SoHo. Looked like he was checking numbers as he came down the block. He rang the bell and got buzzed in. Girl, too. First guy had keys.”

That description sounded all too familiar. I would have dismissed it as coincidence, even though my Cheka training didn’t believe in coincidence, except that I’d just spent an unpleasant hour with his son. This was turning into a family reunion.

“You want me to go back when I get off here?” Gina said.

“Send me a bill and forget you were ever there.”

“You’re the boss.”

I went downstairs, hailed a cab, and told the driver Franklin and Broadway, where there’s a building with an entrance on each street. I watched out the back window the entire ride but saw nothing. I got out on Franklin, went inside, came out on Broadway, walked a block south, then east to City Hall subway station, stopping along the way to look in shop windows, tie my shoe, buy the Post at a newsstand. Nobody appeared to be following me. At City Hall, I caught a crowded uptown train to Fourteenth Street, where I waited until the doors started to close to step out. Up and down the platform, nobody followed. I crossed over to the downtown side and repeated the trick back at City Hall. I returned to the street and hailed a cab. This time I said Greene and Grand. I was sure I was clean of tails.

The block was still quiet. Almost eight o’clock now, but no cool to the evening air. Just to be sure, I waited in a door across from number 32 for fifteen minutes, watching for any activity on the street. A few people walked by, carrying briefcases, backpacks, and shopping bags. Locals on their way home. This was a daytime block. SoHo nightlife was Prince, Spring, and West Broadway.

I crossed and rang Goncharov’s buzzer once, twice, three times. No answer. I returned to my watching post and called a Russian locksmith I know. Forty minutes later a van pulled up with AAA-ACE-ACME LOCKSMITHS painted on the side. A wiry man got out and grinned. I met him at the front door. Three minutes later we were climbing a stifling stairwell to the sixth floor. Two doors, marked A and B. I pointed to the former, and he went to work. It took twelve minutes before the door swung open on oiled hinges. Glad that I’d insisted on expenses from the Mulhollands, I gave the man five hundred dollars. He nodded his thanks and left. I stepped into the cool, dry, air-conditioned air of Alexander Goncharov’s loft.

The lights were on. A dozen halogen cans shone like high noon from the twelve-foot ceiling. If Ratko’s Chelsea apartment was minimalist-chic, this was neoclassical color run amuck—greens, reds, and golds everywhere. A pair of enormous matching sofas faced each other in the center of the room—each could seat six—covered in embroidered gold fabric folded over on itself in a way that defied both physics and finance. Maroon upholstered chairs bookended the sofas. Ebony coffee table with mother-of-pearl inlay in the center. The full-length curtains shimmered avocado and orange. Green paint on the walls, the kind of green and the kind of paint you hire a guy who doesn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages to spend weeks applying. Carpeting picked up all those colors and worked them against red and sky blue in a chain-link pattern. Too much—too much of everything. Before the blood.

A ragged streak marred the carpet, nearly a foot wide, winding from the door, where I stood, through the furniture to a pillared archway at the back of the room. I put a finger to the pile. It came away red and wet. I stood rock still, listening for sounds of life and wishing I had brought a gun. Nothing to hear except the low rush of air being pushed through vents in the ceiling. I followed the trail as quietly as I could, but the old floor creaked under the carpeting. Nothing I could do about that, except stop every few feet to listen. Still no human sounds other than my own.

Through the archway, a kitchen on the right and dining area on the left. I followed the blood down the middle to more pillars and a closed door. Painted steel. I put my ear to the metal. Silence. The knob turned easily in my hand. I gave a gentle push. It didn’t budge. I pushed harder, and the hinges moved without squeaking. Movement to my right. I jumped. Nowhere to go. A big water bug skittered across the stainless steel counter, probing for somewhere to disappear. Exposed like me, until he ran down the leg to the floor and under the baseboard. The door swung softly shut. Some kind of automatic closer. I took a minute to regain my breathing before pushing it open again.