The Bear and the Dragon jrao-11 Read online

  “Really?”

  “Of course. There are some advantages to being a foreign barbarian,” he told her with a sly smile. The giggling response was just right, he thought. Yeah. Nomuri took another careful sip of this rocket fuel. She’d just told him what she wanted to wear. Sensible, too, for this culture. However comfy it might be, it would also be quite discreet.

  “So, what else can you tell me about yourself?” he asked next.

  “There is little to tell. My job is beneath my education, but it carries prestige for … well, for political reasons. I am a highly educated secretary. My employer-well, technically I work for the state, as do most of us, but in fact I work for my minister as if he were in the capitalist sector and paid me from his own pocket.” She shrugged. “I suppose it has always been so. I see and hear interesting things.”

  Don’t want to ask about them now, Nomuri knew. Later, sure, but not now.

  “It is the same with me, industrial secrets and such. Ahh,” he snorted. “Better to leave such things at my official desk. No, Ming, tell me about you.”

  “Again, there is little to tell. I am twenty-four. I am educated. I suppose I am lucky to be alive. You know what happens to many girl babies here …”

  Nomuri nodded. “I have heard the stories. They are distasteful,” he agreed with her. It was more than that. It was not unknown for the father of a female toddler to drop her down a well in the hope that his wife would bear him a son on the next try. One-baby-per-family was almost a law in the PRC, and like most laws in a communist state, that one was ruthlessly enforced. An unauthorized baby was often allowed to come to term, but then as birth took place, when the baby “crowned,” the top of the head appearing, the very moment of birth, the attending physician or nurse would take a syringe loaded with formaldehyde, and stab it into the soft spot at the crown of the almost-newborn’s head, push the plunger, and extinguish its life at the moment of its beginning. It wasn’t something the government of the PRC advertised as government policy, but government policy it was. Nomuri’s one sister, Alice, was a physician, an obstetrician gynecologist trained at UCLA, and he knew that his sister would take poison herself before performing such a barbarous act, or take a pistol to use on whoever demanded that she do it. Even so, some surplus girl babies somehow managed to be born, and these were often abandoned, and then given up for adoption, mainly to Westerners, because the Chinese themselves had no use for them at all. Had it been done to Jews, it would have been called genocide, but there were a lot of Chinese to go around. Carried to extremes, it could lead to racial extinction, but here it was just called population control. “In due course Chinese culture will again recognize the value of women, Ming. That is certain.”div›

  “I suppose it is,” she allowed. “How are women treated in Japan?”

  Nomuri allowed himself a laugh. “The real question is how well they treat us, and how well they permit us to treat them!”

  “Truly?”

  “Oh, yes. My mother ruled the house until she died.”

  “Interesting. Are you religious?”

  Why that question? Chet wondered.

  “I have never decided between Shinto and Zen Buddhism,” he replied, truthfully. He’d been baptized a Methodist, but fallen away from his church many years before. In Japan he’d examined the local religions just to understand them, the better to fit in, and though he’d learned much about both, neither had appealed to his American upbringing. “And you?”

  “I once looked into Falun Gong, but not seriously. I had a friend who got very involved. He’s in prison now.”

  “Ah, a pity.” Nomuri nodded sympathetically, wondering how close the friend had been. Communism remained a jealous system of belief, intolerant of competition of any sort. Baptists were the new religious fad, springing up as if from the very ground itself, started off, he thought, from the Internet, a medium into which American Christians, especially Baptists and Mormons, had pumped a lot of resources of late. And so Jerry Falwell was getting some sort of religious/ideological foothold here? How remarkable-or not. The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and also with Mao it would seem, was that as fine as the theoretical model was, it lacked something the human soul craved. But the communist chieftains didn’t and couldn’t like that very much. The Falun Gong group hadn’t even been a religion at all, not to Nomuri’s way of thinking, but for some reason he didn’t fully understand, it had frightened the powers that be in the PRC enough to crack down on it as if it had been a genuinely counterrevolutionary political movement. He heard that the convicted leaders of the group were doing seriously hard time in the local prisons. The thought of what constituted especially hard time in this country didn’t bear much contemplation. Some of the world’s most vicious tortures had been invented in this country, where the value of human life was a far less important thing than in the nation of his origin, Chet reminded himself. China was an ancient land with an ancient culture, but in many ways these people might as well have been Klingons as fellow human beings, so detached were their societal values from what Chester Nomuri had grown up with. “Well, I really don’t have much in the way of religious convictions.”

  “Convictions?” Ming asked.

  “Beliefs,” the CIA officer corrected. “So, are there any men in your life? A fiance, perhaps?”

  She sighed. “No, not in some time.”

  “Indeed? I find that surprising,” Nomuri observed with studied gallantry.

  “I suppose we are different from Japan,” Ming admitted, with just a hint of sadness in her voice.

  Nomuri lifted the flask and poured some more mao-tai for both. “In that case,” he said, with a smile and a raised eyebrow, “I offer you a friendly drink.”

  “Thank you, Nomuri-san.”

  “My pleasure, Comrade Ming.” He wondered how long it would take. Perhaps not too long at all. Then the real work would begin.

  CHAPTER 7 Developing Leads

  It was the sort of coincidence for which police work is known worldwide. Provalov called militia headquarters, and since he was investigating a homicide, he got to speak with the St. Petersburg murder squad leader, a captain. When he said he was looking for some former Spetsnaz soldiers, the captain remembered his morning meeting in which two of his men had reported finding two bodies bearing possible Spetsnaz tattoos, and that was enough to make him forward the call.

  “Really, the RPG event in Moscow?” Yevgeniy Petrovich Ustinov asked. “Who exactly was killed?”

  “The main target appears to have been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko. He was a pimp,” Provalov told his colleague to the north. “Also his driver and one of his girls, but they appear to have been inconsequential.” He didn’t have to elaborate. You didn’t use an anti-tank rocket to kill a chauffeur and a whore.

  “And your sources tell you that two Spetsnaz veterans did the shooting?”

  “Correct, and they flew back to St. Petersburg soon thereafter.”

  “I see. Well, we fished two such people from the River Neva yesterday, both in their late thirties or so, and both shot in the back of the head.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. We have fingerprints from both bodies. We’re waiting for Central Army Records to match them up. But that will not be very fast.”

  “Let me see what I can do about that, Yevgeniy Petrovich. You see, also present at the murder was Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, and we have concerns that he might have been the true target of the killing.”

  “That would be ambitious,” Ustinov observed coolly. “Perhaps your friends at Dzerzhinskiy Square can get the records morons moving?”

  “I will call them and see,” Provalov promised.

  “Good, 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 dete
ctive 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 other side wasn’t all that smart. The smart ones didn’t break the law in so egregious a way. No, the perfect crime was the one you never discovered, the murder victim you never found, the stolen funds missed by bad accounting procedures, the espionage never discovered. Once you knew a crime had been committed, you had a starting place, and it was like unraveling a sweater. There wasn’t all that much holding the wool together if you just kept picking at it.

  “Tell me, Mishka, how worthy were your Mafia adversaries in New York?” Provalov asked after sipping his second drink.

  Reilly did the same. “It’s not like the movies, Oleg. Except maybe Goodfellas. They’re cheap hoods. They’re not educated. Some of them are pretty damned dumb. Their cachet was that once upon a time they didn’t talk, omertà they used to call it, the Law of Silence. I mean, they’d take the fall and never cooperate. But that changed over time. The people from the Old Country died out and the new generation was softer-and we got tougher. It’s a lot easier to laugh your way through three years than it is to handle ten, and on top of that the organization broke down. They stopped taking care of the families while the dad was in the slammer, and that was real bad for morale. So, they started talking to us. And we got smarter, too, with electronic surveillance-now it’s called ‘special operations’; back then it was a ‘black bag job’-and we weren’t always very careful about getting a warrant. I mean, back in the ’60s, a Mafia don couldn’t take a leak without us knowing what color it was.”

  “And they never fought back?”

  “You mean fuck with us? Mess with an FBI agent?” Reilly grinned at the very thought. “Oleg, nobody ever messes with the FBI. Back then, and still somewhat to this day, we are the Right Hand of God Himself, and if you mess with us, some really bad things are going to happen. The truth of the matter is that nothing like that has ever happened, but the bad guys worry that it might. The rules get bent some, but, no, we never really break them-at least not that I know about. But if you threaten a hood with serious consequences for stepping over the line, chances are he’ll take you seriously.”

  “Not here. They do not respect us that much yet.”

  “Well, then you have to generate that respect, Oleg.” And it really was about that simple in concept, though bringing it about, Reilly knew, would not be all that easy. Would it take having the local cops go off the reservation once in a while, to show the hoods the price of lèse-majesté? That was part of American history, Reilly thought. Town sheriffs like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickok, Lone Wolf Gonzales of the Texas Rangers, Bill Tilghman and Billy Threepersons of the U.S. Marshal Service, the cops of their time who didn’t so much enforce the law as embody it in the way they walked down the street. There was no corresponding Russian lawman of legend. Maybe they needed one. It was part of the heritage of every American cop, and from watching movies and TV westerns, American citizens grew up with the expectation that breaking the law would bring such a man into your life, and not to your personal profit. The FBI had grown up in an era of increased crime during the Great Depression, and had exploited the existing Western tradition with modern technology and procedures to create its own institutional mystique. To do that had meant convicting a lot of criminals, and killing a few on the street as well. In America there was the expectation that cops were heroic figures who didn’t merely enforce the law, but who protected the innocent as well. There was no such tradition here. Growing it would solve many of the problems in the former Soviet Union, where the lingering tradition was of oppression rather than protection. No John Wayne, no Melvin Purvis in Russian movies, and this nation was the poorer for it. As much as Reilly liked working here, and as much as he’d come to like and respect his Russian counterparts, it was much like being dumped into a trash heap with instructions to make it as orderly as Bergdorf-Goodman’s in New York. All the proper things were there, but or
ganizing them made Hercules’ task in the Augean stables seem trivial in comparison. Oleg had the right motivation, and the right set of skills, but it was some job he had ahead of him. Reilly didn’t envy him the task, but he had to help as best he could.

  “I do not envy you very much, Mishka, but your organization’s status in your country is something I would like to have.”

  “It didn’t just happen, Oleg. It’s the product of many years and a lot of good men. Maybe I should show you a Clint Eastwood movie.”

  “Dirty Harry? I have seen it.” Entertaining, the Russian thought, but not overly realistic.

  “No, Hang ’Em High, about the Marshal Service, back in the Old West, when men were men and women were grateful. Actually it’s not true in the usual sense. There wasn’t much crime in the Old West.”

  That made the Russian look up from his drink in surprise. “Then why do all the movies say otherwise?”

  “Oleg, movies have to be exciting, and there isn’t much exciting about raising wheat or punching cattle. The American West was mainly settled by veterans of our Civil War. That was a hard and cruel conflict, but no man who’d survived the Battle of Shiloh was likely to be intimidated by some bozo on a horse, gun or not. A professor at Oklahoma State University did a book on this subject twenty or so years ago. He checked court records and such, and found out that except for saloon shootings-guns and whiskey make a crummy mix, right? — there wasn’t a hell of a lot of crime in the West. The citizens could look after themselves, and the laws they had were pretty tough-not a hell of a lot of repeat offenders-but what it really came down to was that the citizens all had guns and all pretty much knew how to use them, and that is a big deterrent for the bad guys. A cop’s less likely to shoot you than an aroused citizen, when you get down to it. He doesn’t want to do all the paperwork if he can avoid it, right?” A sip and a chuckle from the American.