Frowning, Nimec crouched down, reached into the pool table’s innards again, and set the balls up at one end of the table for a point-of-aim drill. The more he thought about Bashkir’s possible complicity, the greater his misgivings. It wasn’t just that the puzzle was incomplete; he felt as if he’d been given pieces that didn’t fit at all, and had been slipped into the box to confound him.
He supposed there was nothing to do except take it one step at a time… and the logical way to proceed was to follow the explosives from their point of origin to the final point of sale.
He put some more chalk on the tip of his stick, leaned over the table, and began firing balls into the corner pocket opposite him. First thing in the morning he would give Gordian a call. As an exporter of American technology, Roger had constant dealings with people in Customs, and one or two of them might be good for a tip. If Lian was the producer of the explosives, and Zavtra had acted as the middleman outfit, who had received them in the United States? And how exactly had they been moved?
Somebody had completed the transfer, and Nimec intended to find out who it was.
TWENTY-FIVE
The moment he got off the horn with Nimec, Gordian rang up Lenny Reisenberg, who headed his regional shipping office in New York.
“To what do I owe a call from the gantse knahker?” Lenny said, taking the call from his secretary.
“I thought I was the groyss makher.”
“There’s a subtle difference,” Lenny said. “The first means ‘big shot.’ The second’s somebody who makes things happen. Generally speaking, though, the terms are interchangeable, since most makhers are also knahkers, and vice versa.” He paused. “Now, on the other hand, if I were to call you an ahlte kakhker, you’d have reason to be peeved.”
Gordian smiled tolerantly, shaking his head. He had no idea why, but Lenny seemed convinced it was vital that he learn Yiddish, and had been giving him these lessons in regular installments for over a decade. Were the best employees always so full of idiosyncrasies, or was it just that he knew how to pick them?
“Len, I need a favor,” he said.
“And because it’s only nine in the morning in your neck of the woods, and you’re still on your first cup of coffee, I’m assuming it’s urgent.”
“Very,” Gordian said. “There’s a Russian exporter, the Zavtra Group—”
“Hold it a sec, let me jot this down.” Gordian heard Lenny shuffling things around on his desk. “Okay, that’s spelled Z-A-V-T-R-A?”
“Right.”
“Don’t think we’ve ever done business with them. Off the top of my head, of course.”
“That’s not important, Len. What I want are chronological records of everything Zavtra’s shipped into the New York area over the past, say, six to eight months. We may eventually have to go back further, but let’s start with that. I’ll need to know the ultimate purchaser, too.”
“May I ask why I’m getting hold of this information?”
“On this one, it’s better you don’t.”
Reisenberg huffed out a breath. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. There’s a guy I know in the customs office over at the World Trade Center. If we end this conversation in the next ten seconds I might be able to get hold of him, take him out for a bite. I’ve got just the thing to make him feel kindly toward us, come to think of it.”
“Whatever it takes, as long as you don’t get yourself in hot water.”
“Right, right. I’ll call you back soon as I find out anything.”
“Thanks, Len.”
“No problem. This is why I’m known far and wide as a stud among prizewinning thoroughbreds.”
“And a genuine mensch,” Gordian said.
“Sorry, don’t speak French,” Reisenberg said.
And hung up the phone.
“You ask me, it’s a crying shame those antismoking Nazis made it against the law to light up anywhere in the city, including your own fucking toilet.” This out of Steve Bailey, the customs supervisor Lenny Reisenberg had mentioned to Gordian. He was sitting across from Lenny in a leather booth at Quentin’s, a British-style pub across the street from the twin towers, with a lot of dark wood wall paneling, an enormous horseshoe bar, and middle-aged waiters who had been working there long enough to recite the menu backward and forward by heart.
Lenny gave him a noncommittal shrug.
“There are pros and cons,” he said.
“You going to tell me something’s wrong with restaurants having smoking sections? The way they used to before the world got taken over by prudes and sissies?”
“Truth is,” Lenny said, “I feel sorry for the poor waiter who’s put at risk of lung cancer because of the secondary smoke he’s got to inhale on the job.”
“Spoken like the reformed three-pack-a-day man that you are.” Bailey snorted. “I mean, the owner feels compunctions about his staff, he can go ahead and hire smokers to serve the smoking sections.”
“Even so, Steve,” Lenny said, “what they’d do in the old days was calculate the size of the sections according to seating capacity, which made it kind of hard for the Board of Health to enforce the regulations. The inspectors would have to come in and count heads to make sure there were no violations, you know what I’m saying.” He shrugged again. “Meanwhile, the people that ran the places would cram the tables so close together, the guy at the next table practically would be sitting on your lap…”
“Or gal at the next table, to look at the positive side…”
“Whatever.” Lenny snorted. “The point is—”
“That I just finished eating a delicious lamb stew, and have a fresh Macanudo tucked away in my pocket, and want to smoke it to round out my dining experience,” Bailey said, brushing a hand through his frazzle of white hair. “At fifty years old, with a prostate that’s bigger than a basketball, I don’t have many ways left of having fun. A guy deserves some slack, Lenny.”
Lenny looked at him. He figured that was about as perfect an opening as he could have asked for in a million years.
“That reminds me.” He reached into a pocket of his sport coat, pulled out a slim envelope with the Madison Square Garden logo on it, and slid it across the table.
Bailey stared down at it, keeping his hands under the table.
“Jesus,” he said. “What the hell’s that?”
“A little gift, Steve. From the New York Knickerbockers to me, and me to you.”
“The Knicks?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jesus.” Bailey swallowed, one hand appearing and reaching for the envelope. He picked it up gingerly, almost as if it were hot to the touch, then lifted the flap with his fingertip and peeked inside.
His eyes widened.
“Jesus,” he repeated for the third time, his head wagging from side to side. “This is a goddamned season pass.”
“Well, partial season, technically, being as it’s already January,” Lenny said. He glanced at Bailey. “Why’re you shaking your head?”
“I’m not shaking my head.”
“You are,” Lenny said. “If you don’t like my gift…”
“Of course I like it, you know I do, how the fuck could I not? But being that Christmas is over, and you don’t know my birthday, there’s got to be some other reason you’re giving this to me, and I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”