David Duffy - Last to Fold

Polina’s voice again. “Leo?”

“What the…”

“Move, out the door.”

“Kosokov, what the fuck is this? I have no time for…”

The shotgun roared.

Polina spoke again. “One barrel left. Move!”

A couple of minutes of indistinguishable sounds.

Petrovin stopped the tape. “We’re pretty sure Kosokov and Polina are taking Gorbenko from the house to the barn.”

“Over there,” Polina said when he started it again.

“What do you want?” Gorbenko said.

“We’ll get to that. Open that trapdoor.”

Silence, punctuated by a couple of grunts before Gorbenko spoke again.

“Look, Kosokov, I can…”

The blast from the shotgun cut him off. The sound of a bang, a thump, and another. Then silence. The speakers died. Petrovin looked at me with a grim expression. “She shot him in the chest. The thumps are the body falling down the stairs. Bomb shelter underneath the barn. Concrete construction, stocked with all the staples—food, water, even vodka. Must’ve dated from Soviet times.”

I’d been luckier than I realized a few hours earlier. “The recording survived all these years?”

“Amazingly, yes. The chip wasn’t damaged by the blast, and no one searched the body. Gorbenko was supposed to call that night—one way or the other. When Chmil didn’t hear from him, he went to the dacha the next morning. Nothing there, except the ransacked house, some blood, and the burned-down barn. We didn’t know about the shelter, of course. It had snowed all night. No way to tell who or what had come or gone. He made a decision to leave everything as it was. Remember, no one knew we’d turned Gorbenko. Maybe he was right, I don’t know. The investigation died, with the Cheka’s help.

“Then two weeks ago, some kids discover a trapdoor in the foundation of the barn. Under the trapdoor they find the shelter, and in the shelter, what’s left of two ten-year-old corpses, one shot, one burned at the stake. The amazing thing is, the local police notified us—not the Cheka. We were able to secure the site.”

“And make sure Ivanov announced the news to the world.”

He grinned sheepishly. “As I said before…”

I wasn’t listening. “When did you say the kids found the bodies?”

“Mid-May.”

That couldn’t be it. Ratko had phished Mulholland months earlier. “If Polina shot Gorbenko, then who killed Kosokov?”

“We still don’t know.”

“And that’s one reason Ivanov hasn’t run with the rest of the story.”

He nodded.

“The fact that Polina’s alive makes her a leading suspect, doesn’t it?”

He was lifting his glass, but he stopped midair and returned it to the counter. “You know she’s alive?”

I grinned, partly to cover my carelessness. I’d assumed he knew about Polina. All the wits Sergei had knocked out hadn’t returned to the roost. No harm done, that I could see, but I told myself to watch my step.

“You’re late to the party. Yes, she’s living here. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

He looked down at his glass. Perhaps I’d nicked his pride. “Where is she?”

“Could be I’m holding the bargaining chip now. Tell me about Rad Rislyakov.”

He shook his head.

“You know he’s dead? You can’t say anything that’ll hurt him now.”

He nodded.

“You were right the other day, your guesswork about Greene Street. I’d gone there looking for Ratko. I found the body. Iakov was there, too. He’d been shot, he said by the same guy who shot Ratko. I think the killer works for Polina’s current husband. I think she had him kill Ratko.”

I might have slapped him. He drew back, jumped up, froze for a moment, then walked around the room. When he came back, he said, “Why’d she do that?”

“Multiple reasons. Rislyakov was blackmailing her. He knew who she was, who she’d become. He horned in on a scheme she was running and was taking fifty percent not to tell Lachko. Then he got greedy and wanted a hundred thousand dollars, cash. I delivered the money to his people, and they led me to him. She had her husband’s driver follow me. I led him to Greene Street.”

He sat down again and rubbed his face. “What kind of scheme?”

“I don’t know, but I’m betting it’s connected to your two corpses. Rislyakov hacked his way into her computer several months ago. He removed a big file, without her knowing. He also learned enough to get close to her daughter—another way to keep tabs on Polina.”

“The auburn-haired girl?”

“That’s right. Her name’s Eva.”

That brought his head around, a funny look in his eye. “But you don’t know what he stole?”

“No. Only that she panicked when she found out.”

“How do you come to have all this information, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I had twenty-four hours with Rislyakov’s laptop, remember?”

“The one you gave Barsukov?”

“Yes. After I copied its hard drive and made a few programming modifications. Rislyakov put a keyboarding bug on Polina’s computer. I put one on his.”

He grinned. “You can see everything he does.”

“Cheka habits die hard.”

I poured a little more vodka and offered him the bottle. He shook his head. “Listen to this again,” he said. He pushed some keys on his computer, and the tape started.

Kosokov’s voice . “National outrage? Russia today? Hah! Don’t make me laugh. Neither of us will live to see it, in any event. Like I said, you made your deal. Good luck to you. I’m taking my evidence with me. My life insurance policy.”

The door crashing open. Polina saying, “Tolik, I came as soon as I could. What the hell is going on? What are you doing here?”

Petrovin stopped the computer. “Kosokov says he’s taking his evidence with him—his life insurance policy. Suppose that’s the records of his bank, all the Cheka’s transactions.”

“Okay, I’ll suppose. But he’s dead.”

“She’s not. Suppose that’s what she had on her computer. Suppose that’s what Rislyakov stole.”

“Dammit!” It made perfect sense. I did my own revolution of the living room. Polina was scared about Mulholland’s bank crashing. She was looking at being cut adrift again—bringing back every fear she ever had since she was a kid. She’d be terrified, desperate, just like that day at Kosokov’s dacha. She needed money. She used Kosokov’s file to put the bite on Lachko. He still had Cheka connections. They moved the payoff money through Ratko’s laundry—and Lachko assigned Ratko to figure out who was hitting on him. Ratko did just that and… No, he didn’t. He didn’t report back. Lachko was ignorant of Polina the day he hauled me out to Brighton Beach. Ratko had kept his discovery to himself and gone underground. Less than perfect sense. I returned to the kitchen.

“If you’re right, and that’s what Rislyakov stole, why didn’t he turn it over to his masters?”

Petrovin held out his glass. “Rislyakov was working for us. He was our man inside the Badger organization.”

I laughed. “I may be an ex-Chekist, Alexander Petrovich, but that doesn’t make me newly gullible.”

He shook his head. “Blood’s thicker than money, even in Russia.”

“Meaning?”

“Rislyakov had a conflicted relationship with his parents. They were dissidents during the Soviet years. His father spent time in the Gulag. Ratko competed with politics for his mother’s attention. He went through a rebellious phase, fell in with a bad crowd, but a couple of teachers recognized his technical brilliance and helped him get back on a straight path. He reconciled with his folks in the midnineties. He was living with them, while he was going to university, in an apartment on Guryanova Street.”