anything else?”
“Another name, Suvorov, Klementi Ivan’ch, reportedly a former KGB officer, but that is all I have at the moment. Does the name mean anything to you?” You could hear the man shaking his head over the phone, Provalov noted.
“Nyet, never heard that one,” the senior detective replied as he wrote it down. “Connection?”
“My informant thinks he’s the man who arranged the killing.”
“I’ll check our records here to see if we have anything on him. Another former ’Sword and Shield’ man, eh? How many of those guardians of the state have gone bad?” the St. Petersburg cop asked rhetorically.
“Enough,” his colleague in Moscow agreed, with an unseen grimace.
“This Avseyenko fellow, also KGB?”
“Yes, he reportedly ran the Sparrow School.”
Ustinov chuckled at that one. “Oh, a state-trained pimp. Marvelous. Good girls?”
“Lovely,” Provalov confirmed. “More than we can afford.”
“A real man doesn’t have to pay for it, Oleg Gregoriyevich,” the St. Petersburg cop assured his Moscow colleague.
“That is true, my friend. At least not until long afterwards,” Provalov added.
“That is the truth!” A laugh. “Let me know what you find out?”
“Yes, I will fax you my notes.”
“Excellent. I will share my information with you as well,” Ustinov promised. There is a bond among homicide investigators across the world. No country sanctions the private taking of human life. Nation-states reserve such power for themselves alone.
In his dreary Moscow office, Lieutenant Provalov made his notes for several minutes. It was too late to call the RVS about rattling the Central Army Records cage. First thing in the morning, he promised himself. Then it was time to leave. He picked his coat off the tree next to his desk and headed out to where his official car was parked. This he drove to a corner close to the American Embassy, and a place called Boris Godunov’s, a friendly and warm bar. He’d only been there for five minutes when a familiar hand touched his shoulder.
“Hello, Mishka,” Provalov said, without turning.
“You know, Oleg, it’s good to see that Russian cops are like American cops.”
“It is the same in New York?”
“You bet,” Reilly confirmed. “After a long day of chasing bad guys, what’s better than a few drinks with your pals?” The FBI agent waved to the bartender for his usual, a vodka and soda. “Besides, you get some real work done in a place like this. So, anything happening on the Pimp Case?”
“Yes, the two who did the killing may have shown up dead in St. Petersburg.” Provalov tossed down the last of his straight vodka and filled the American in on the details, concluding, “What do you make of that?”
“Either it’s revenge or insurance, pal. I’ve seen it happen at home.”
“Insurance?”
“Yeah, had it happen in New York. The Mafia took Joey Gallo out, did it in public, and they wanted it to be a signature event, so they got a black hood to do the hit—but then the poor bastard gets shot himself about fifteen feet away. Insurance, Oleg. That way the subject can’t tell anybody who asked him to take the job. The second shooter just walked away, never did get a line on him. Or it could have been a revenge hit: whoever paid them to do the job whacked them for hitting the wrong target. You pays your money and you takes your choice, pal.”
“How do you say, wheels within wheels?”
Reilly nodded. “That’s how we say it. Well, at least it gives you some more leads to run down. Maybe your two shooters talked to somebody. Hell, maybe they even kept a diary.” It was like tossing a rock into a pond, Reilly thought. The ripples just kept expanding in a case like this. Unlike a nice domestic murder, where a guy whacked his wife for fucking around, or serving dinner late, and then confessed while crying his eyes out at what he’d done. But by the same token, it was an awfully loud crime, and those, more often than not, were the ones you broke because people commented on the noise, and some of those people knew things that you could use. It was just a matter of getting people out on the street, rattling doorknobs and wearing out shoes, until you got what you needed. These Russian cops weren’t dumb. They lacked some of the training that Reilly took for granted, but for all that, they had the proper cop instincts, and the fact of the matter was that if you followed the proper procedures, you’d break your cases, because the