Lawrence Block - The Burglar on the Prowl

"Of course the Russians did what they could to squelch the unrest and wipe out the partisan bands. They didn't give it top priority. If it was enough for the partisans to keep the cauldron simmering, so it was enough for the Soviets to keep a lid on it. Different men had that assignment over the years, all of their efforts falling somewhere between failure and success. Then, sometime in the early Seventies, they gave the job to a man named Valentine Kukarov.

"Kukarov was a Russian, born in Tashkent around the time the Russian winter was stopping the Nazi advance in its tracks. He was around thirty when they sent him to Riga, and he'd already achieved a high rank in the KGB. He went after the Latvian partisans the way William Gorgas went after yellow fever mosquitoes in Panama. Anyone suspected of anti-Soviet activity was executed as an enemy of the state. Anyone who might have knowledge of such activity was interrogated, and the question-and-answer sessions often ended in death. He wasn't there long before Latvians started calling him the Black Scourge of Riga, and the name stayed with him when his superiors shifted him to another assignment. He got a promotion, because he'd done what nobody else could do. He didn't stifle the desire for independence, nobody could have done that, but he left the citizenry in no position to do anything about it. Hundreds of partisans had been killed, hundreds more were shipped to the Gulag, and thousands of ordinary Latvian citizens were relocated to remote regions of the USSR, their places in Latvia taken by Russians more likely to be loyal subjects of the men in power.

"Somewhere along the way, Kukarov stopped being all that loyal himself. On an overseas assignment, he got turned by an American agent who got him to double. He went on for a few years playing both ends against the middle, until it was clear that his KGB bosses were catching on to him, whereupon he told his CIA control he wanted to defect.

"They told him lots of luck, but you're on your own. It was one thing to co-opt the Black Scourge of Riga and make clandestine use of him, but it was quite another to welcome him into the land of the free and help him cram for his naturalization test."

"Well, that's the fucking government for you," said Michael Quattrone.

A few heads turned at that, but when he didn't say anything further they turned back to me.

"In 1987," I said, "Kukarov came over on his own. He must have had his pick of fake passports, and an entry visa for the US wouldn't have been hard for him to arrange. He'd already shaved his heavy black beard, and as soon as he got here he bought himself a blond wig, plucked his bushy black eyebrows, and dyed them to match the wig. He wasn't worried that the KGB would stay up nights trying to find him. The only thing he had to worry about was the Latvian-American community, and he wasn't greatly worried, because he'd been careful all his life about not having his picture taken. He was fairly sure nobody had a decent photo of him. They might have a description, but it no longer fit him, so what good would it do them?

"Then Latvia became independent. And, even worse from Kukarov's point of view, the Soviet Union collapsed and access to secret KGB files was suddenly a lot easier to come by. And the KGB had several nice clear photographs of him. Of course he was a little older now, and he kept the eyebrows plucked and dyed, and shaved twice a day, and never went anywhere without the blond wig.

"Add in the fact that more Latvians were finding their way into the country, either as immigrants or as embassy staff. It had been twenty years since the heyday of the Black Scourge of Riga, but that didn't mean anybody was ready to forgive and forget. If someone who knew him when were to take a hard look at him and got to imagining him with dark hair and bushy eyebrows, well, that wouldn't be so great. Where could he go, Australia? There were plenty of Latvians in Australia. And he was past fifty, and too old to start over somewhere new.

"He came up with a way out. Plastic surgery. And which eminent plastic surgeon do you think he picked?"

Mapes knew this was coming, he must have seen it coming a mile off, but he still winced a little. I was more interested in watching some other faces, only a few of which turned to look at the good doctor.

"The physician he chose," I went on, "was a board-certified plastic surgeon with an excellent professional reputation. He did the usual run of nose jobs and facelifts and liposuction and tummy tucks, putting caviar on the table by making the well-to-do a little easier to look at. He also did a good deal of reconstructive surgery on burn victims and accident survivors and children born with facial birth defects. A lot of his work with kids was what lawyers would callpro bono. I don't know if doctors would call it that or something else, but whatever you call it he didn't get paid for it."

I glanced over at Marty, who appeared surprised. Nobody, I'd have to tell him, can be a shitheel a hundred percent of the time. It's too exhausting.

"Somewhere along the way," I said, "this doctor became first acquainted and then involved with what we might call the criminal element. Maybe he found criminals fascinating. Many of us do. Or maybe he just saw a way to turn an extra dollar, a dollar to be paid in cash, and one he could thus forget to report when he filed his tax return."

The two government men tried to keep straight faces, but they weren't very good at it. I had their attention now, and it showed.

"He did some favors. Took out bullets and cleaned the wounds without making a report, the way the law says you have to. Maybe he wrote out a few death certificates, putting down cardiac arrest as the cause of death. Well, it always is. If somebody cuts your throat or puts a bullet in the back of your head, you die when your heart stops beating. So he wasn't exactly lying…

"Still, he was heroically overqualified for that sort of work, and it was only a question of time before someone made better use of his abilities. He became the man to see if you wanted to change your face to one the law wouldn't recognize. The people who needed his services would pay big money, and they'd pay it in cash, and wouldn't try to deduct it from their own taxes, either. And there was no hospital cutting into the pie, because he had to do the work in the privacy of his own office. That was generally safe enough with facial surgery, and if anything went wrong, well, he could just fill out the death certificate appropriately. But why should anything go wrong? Nothing ever did, and it wasn't long before he'd paid off the mortgage on the big house in Riverdale and had a nice cash cushion in the bargain."

That got some heads to turn. Whoever hadn't already figured it out now knew that their host for the afternoon was the very doctor I was talking about.

So why not call him by name?

"One day," I said, "Dr. Crandall R. Mapes had a visitor, referred by one of his associates in the world of organized crime. The man wore a blond wig and explained the steps he'd already taken to alter his appearance. But he still had the same face underneath it all, and he wanted a new one.

"Dr. Mapes agreed to take him as a patient, and the two settled on a price. Mapes took pictures, as he always did for every client, a group of shots showing the subject's face from various angles. He studied the photographs at length, devised a plan, and, on the appointed day, performed the first of a series of surgeries upon the face of Valentine Kukarov."

"You're slandering me in my own home," Mapes said, "in front of a roomful of witnesses."

"They say it ain't bragging if it's true," I told him, "and the same thing holds for slander."

"You can't prove any of this." He got to his feet. "Allegations, nothing but allegations. I'm damned if I'm going to listen to allegations." I don't know if he was going for the front door or the dining room, but his body language was saying See ya later, Allegator.