David Duffy - Last to Fold

“Who the fuck cares? If I wasted any time thinking about it, I’d assume she did.”

“Why was Ratko operating behind your back?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You hadn’t seen him in months. You had your men out looking for some sign of him. You had no idea about the Greene Street loft. He took everything necessary to run the laundry and went underground. He was shutting you out.”

“Turbo, you and I have coexisted on the same planet for the last twenty years only because our paths did not cross. Now they have, and it remains to be seen whether we will continue to coexist at all. If we do not, you can be assured your soul will be resting back in the zek -filled sewer it crawled out of in 1953. I practically raised Ratko from the time he was a teenager. When I find out who killed him, I’ll make sure he pays. It could well have been you, in which case I’ll be doubly happy to even the score. Rurik is watching from the window. He was a guard in the Gulag. He hates zeks almost more than I do.”

He grunted and moved his chair again. Didn’t appear to take a lot of effort. I wondered how sick he really was. Ivanov wasn’t infallible.

“Still no answer.”

“You despise me, Turbo. I despise you. Part history, part jealousy, part fate. You’re still healthy. I sit here in a wheelchair with fucking tubes up my nose.”

He sucked the papirosa down to the nub. The late-afternoon sun burned as hot as noon.

“You destroyed my career. For what? Score points with my father? Claw your way over my back? You always hated me because I was born with the Cheka in my blood and you were just a shitty zek .”

He spat so hard the bile landed in the pool with a dull plop. While he fished for another smoke, I walked around the water. The sun bounced off the palace roof, rays splintering off the tiles, solar blades baked in reflected heat. I could see Rurik through the glare, behind a picture window, watching my every step. I stopped in front of the chapel doors. Prayer wasn’t going to help. I continued my circumnavigation of the Barsukov world I’d left—been thrown out of—long ago and been sucked back into. The old world had been twisted but something I could comprehend. I understood how it worked. This one, I wasn’t sure I could wrap my head around. Bigger question was, why did I want to?

I arrived back at the wheelchair. Lachko was staring at the pool in a haze of cardboard smoke.

“You still haven’t answered the question. Ratko was running out on you. Why?”

He bent forward in the wheelchair, hands at his sides, cigarette hanging just above the ground. “I don’t know.”

I almost believed him, but it could’ve all been an act. He could lie as easily as Polina—or the Politburo bosses he used to work for.

“What the fuck do you want, Turbo?”

“What was that ruse with Mulholland all about?”

Lachko looked up, eyes as empty as a beggar’s soup bowl. “I told you before, I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

In a strange way, I sensed he was telling the truth.

“Why’d you bring him out here?”

He shrugged and turned the wheelchair away. I’d learned as much—or as little—as I was going to. I said, “Okay, let’s talk business. Twenty percent.”

He spun back. “What the fuck?”

“You heard me. The database and the code. They’re yours for twenty percent of the profits.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“Business, Lachko. And maybe a little bit of payback. I’ve got it, you need it. That’s the deal.”

“Have you forgotten Friday night?”

“Do I look like I have? I’ve put all the necessary protections in place. Anything happens to me, Aleksei, Victoria, anyone, you’re shut down.”

“Ten.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fucking zek. ”

“You’ll be a richer Chekist. I’ll be a rich zek. We’ll still hate each other.”

I dropped the portable hard drive in his lap.

He spat once more into the pool. “Don’t come back.”

The Potemkin was where I’d left it. The cell phone buzzed again as I crossed the courtyard.

Foos said, “She’s gone.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. We went to Lombardi’s with Pig Pen, came back, she said she was tired, wanted a nap, and stretched out on the couch. I thought I heard a cell phone ring a little later, and when I came out to check, she was gone.”

“Dammit.”

“She’s a sweet kid, but a real head case. Ratko screwed her over pretty good. Probably best for her he croaked. He would’ve broken her heart otherwise. It’s pretty damned fragile as it is. She’s still too hung up on him to see what was happening.”

“Sounds like she told you a fair amount.”

“I just bought the pizza and listened. Been a long time since anyone took an interest in what she thinks.”

“She say anything about her mother?”

“Uh-uh. Only that she and Ratko talked about family a lot. His parents were dead. He was always asking about hers.”

No surprise there.

“Can you tell who called her?”

“On it right now.”

The Potemkin ’s tires squealed as I accelerated through Lachko’s gate. I knew why I’d been tricked into visiting Brighton Beach. The trickster wanted Eva. I didn’t know why, but I had a good idea who. The list of potential tricksters was growing short.

“Disposable cell phone,” Foos said. “The one that called her.”

“Fuck your mother.”

He ignored me. He’d heard it before. “Call came in a few blocks from here. Dover Street.”

My head whipped around. I yelped as my neck sent a shot of pain down my right side.

“You okay?” Foos said.

“Yeah. Where on Dover?”

“Dover and Front. Right under the bridge.”

The pain vanished as I ran for the door.

Spies are a paranoid bunch. For good reason. There usually is someone out to get us. That doesn’t mean we lack humor.

One of the trickiest challenges I faced in a foreign city was finding secure venues to meet agents. America’s most crowded metropolis, New York, offers wonderful anonymity. Everyone consciously ignores everyone else around them. But it’s still difficult to find places where one is truly alone—and out of the reach of prying eyes, ears, cameras, microphones, and binoculars, should there be any interested, which, of course, we constantly assume there are.

I found a few good venues in my time—the bar at the Village Vanguard, any number of undervisited rooms at the Metropolitan Museum (ditto for the Cloisters), the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (less crowded than its Bronx brethren), windswept piers on either river, especially in winter, and, one of the very best, a well-traveled, thoroughly anonymous gay men’s pickup spot in the parking lot of a Queens park. I appreciated the irony of that one more than my agents. By far my favorite was the old Civil Defense shelter in one of the stone piers supporting the Brooklyn Bridge. I happened on it completely by accident, in the mid-1980s. The lock had rusted to the point of breaking, or maybe someone had broken in and run away, leaving the iron door banging in the wind on a sleeting winter night, the noise echoing around the chamber of the bridge’s understructure. I was walking to the subway after meeting an agent on one of the East River piers. There was nobody on the street, so in I went.

I found a forgotten Cold War fallout shelter. Big, damp, dirty room, stocked to the ceiling with cases of high-protein crackers (date-stamped 1962), drums of water, crates of medicines, and boxes of blankets. There were some wooden chairs and tables, two dozen folding canvas cots, some kerosene lanterns and multiple cans of fuel. Iron rungs climbed to a second exit in the bridge ramp. Whether the stone of the superstructure was enough to protect the inhabitants from the feared nuclear winter was anybody’s guess, but the early 1960s—the months of the Cuban Missile Crisis (we knew it as the Caribbean Crisis)—were hardly a rational time in America. Everyone was scared, for good reason.