David Duffy - Last to Fold

I was going to pay for my sins. I steered the conversation toward safer ground.

“Your father was French?”

“Via New Orleans. My mother, Scottish, via east Texas. They lasted about as long as every other Franco-Anglo attempt to get along. My old man lit out for California shortly after I was born.”

“Tu parles français?”

She shook her head. “Like Loretta says, ‘If you’re lookin’ at me, you’re lookin’ at country.’”

The designer number she was wearing had as much to do with country as I do with Tanzania. “Loretta?”

“Loretta Lynn. She’s kind of a hero for me.”

“See, there’s something I didn’t know.”

“Y’all want to keep talkin’, you’ll…”

The twang was pronounced tonight. So was her temper.

Giancarlo brought the first course and the wine. “You’ll like this. It’s an ’89.” He poured her a small taste, which she swirled and sipped. She smiled broadly at him, and he grinned back.

“Perfect,” she said, and I had the distinct impression she was referring to more than the flavor.

Giancarlo poured. I took a small swallow. I know a little about a lot of things, but wine isn’t one of them. I like it fine, but I prefer beer and vodka. I thought that could be about to change as layer after layer of flavor filled my mouth. Victoria was eying me appraisingly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything quite like that.”

“You’re not likely to again.” She tucked into her salad.

We ate in silence for a while. The seafood was almost as good as the wine.

“I’m waitin’,” she said.

“Petrovin tell you about Iakov?”

She looked up, confused. “Petrovin? Who the hell’s Petrovin?”

My turn to be confused. “Russian law enforcement officer? Eye patch? Linen suit? He was in your office yesterday.”

“You mean… He told you his name’s Petrovin?”

“Actually, he told me his name isn’t Petrovin, but that’s how he introduced himself. He was being cautious.”

“Are all Russians crazy?”

“Dostoyevsky would tell you probably. Chekhov would disagree. Zinoviev would blame the system.”

“You’re all full of horseshit, that’s for sure. Give me Hemingway any day.”

We weren’t going to agree on literature. “What’s Petrovin’s real name?”

“Uh-uh. He may be crazy, but I’m sure he has reasons, especially when it comes to trusting you. Back to business. Rad Rislyakov.”

“You’re interested in his money laundry.”

“What do you know about that?” she snapped.

“He built it for Barsukov. He uses the information he hacked from T.J. Maxx to create synthetic identities, and he uses those identities to create bank accounts to move money through. He’s got an army of couriers working ATMs all over the Tri-State Area. I happened on a few earlier today. Told Coyle an hour ago where to find them and one base of operation.”

“You didn’t say anything about this the other day.”

“Didn’t know anything about it the other day.”

“You set off my bullshit meter every other time you open your mouth. How do you know what you know?”

“I did some digging. I got lucky. Some of Rislyakov’s associates aren’t very bright.”

“A nonanswer if I ever heard one.”

I raised my glass. “Wine’s excellent.”

“You said your interest in Rislyakov had nothing to do with mine.”

“That’s true.” I debated briefly whether to go on, but I knew I would. You have to give a little to get a little, or perhaps more to the point, I was enjoying myself and her company. Or I do like to live dangerously.

“Rislyakov whaled Mulholland.”

“What? He’s the one?”

“Uh-huh.”

The green eyes grew brighter. “You know that for a fact?”

“Yep. He was blackmailing Mrs. Mulholland.”

“How? Why?”

“I’m going to plead privacy on the how. It doesn’t have an impact on Mulholland, his bank, or the money laundry. The why I don’t know. Except that Ratko had a gambling problem. He might have needed money fast.”

“Had?”

Mistake. She was sharp. “He went through rehab. It took.”

She eyed me over her fork, uncertain what she believed. “How do you know all this?”

“Same way I know about Bergdorf.”

That bought me time, at least. She chewed her salad. I took a bite and resolved to be more careful.

“Back to Mulholland. Why’d Rislyakov phish him? Don’t tell me he just got lucky.”

“That question bothers me, to be candid. I don’t have a good answer.”

“Have you asked Rislyakov?”

“I told you the other day—we’ve never met.”

“Just checking.” She stopped the questions long enough to eat and think. I did the same. The food was every bit as good as last night.

“Tell me about Barsukov—you and Barsukov. Both Barsukovs.”

“That’s complicated. There’s a lot of context.”

“We’ve got half a bottle of wine and the pasta coming. Dessert, too, if we’re still talking. Was Wednesday really the first time you’d seen him in twenty years?”

“Scout’s honor.” Cheka honor wouldn’t mean anything to her.

“Not likely. Scout, I mean.”

Maybe I should’ve stuck with it. I thought about what I was going to say. Suppressing my past had blown up one relationship. Would putting it out there, right up front, ignite another? The lifelong need to skip over, to prevaricate, to hide my past, was missing—for the first time. The sense of liberation wasn’t jarring—but I think the ground shifted beneath the table.

“My link to the Barsukovs is Iakov, the father. He got me out of the Gulag and into the KGB. I owe him pretty much everything.”

“ You were in the Gulag? Like whatsisname… Solzhenitsyn?”

“Born there. My mother was a zek, a prisoner. Earned my own ticket back as a teenager. Safe to say I would have died there—years ago—without Iakov.”

“This sounds like a good story, for once. Go on.”

“You really want to hear it?’

“You have my full attention.” The green eyes said she wasn’t lying.

“I was born in Dalstroy, a complex of camps in Siberia, the day Stalin died. March fifth, 1953, also the day Prokofiev died, but no one remembers that. My mother spent most of her life in the camps. I never met my father. We were released—she and I—in the amnesty after Stalin’s death. She died on the way home. I grew up in an orphanage, got in trouble, got sent back.”

“Hold on! You’re going too fast. Why was your mother in the Gulag?”

“No real reason. Millions of people were arrested, incarcerated, released, incarcerated again, executed, all for no reason whatsoever. Other than Stalin’s insanity. The entire Soviet system was based on betrayal—friend against friend, wife against husband, father against son. We were all complicit, the Soviet people, I mean. One big way the Party kept control. The biggest betrayal of all was the Gulag itself—prisons, work camps, execution chambers, all set up by Russians for Russians who had done nothing, except they’d been betrayed. We’ve never come to terms with what that means. As a result, I’m a zek, and that’s a shameful thing to be. In the eyes of other Russians, I’ll always be a zek. When they see me, they see someone they betrayed. They can’t deal with that, so they transfer the betrayal to me. It’s my fault. I was a prisoner because I betrayed the Party and the state.”

“Jesus! You all are crazy!”

“I won’t deny it. It’s like when Winston Smith and his lover betray each other at the end of 1984 . They do it because they’re forced to by Big Brother. It’s not their fault, but once they do, they can no longer look each other in the eye. That was Soviet society, in a nutshell, in fact, not fiction. Still is, to a bigger extent than anyone wants to admit. Solzhenitsyn was one of the few who bucked the system, the culture, the whole deal, by writing about it. Telling the truth for everyone to see. He blew the lid off. But it takes more than one explosion to revolutionize a system that shaped generations. I’ll get off my soapbox now.”