I picked it up. It was a watch. But not a normal watch with a wristband. This was a fob watch, hanging from a short, two-inch chain.
A nurse’s fob watch.
“Check this out,” I called out to Aparo.
He stepped in. I held it up to him.
“Daphne Sokolov?” he asked.
“Got to be. She was here.” The watch jump-started my mind, which had started screening various possible scenarios.
“So that’s what the shooters were doing,” Aparo said. “They came for her.”
“Or for them,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe she and Sokolov were both being held here.”
“Or maybe she was being held here and Sokolov came for her,” Aparo offered.
“Our meek science teacher turning into the Terminator? I’m not sure I buy that.”
Aparo pursed his lips in agreement. “Maybe he recruited some muscle to break her out.”
“Maybe.” I frowned, frustrated by what I felt we were getting sucked into. “Here’s our problem. We don’t know anything about this Sokolov, and I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere until we do.”
I tried to take a step back and process what we knew and what we were seeing.
The one-eyed bandit is outside Sokolov’s place while, up in the apartment, there’s a scuffle that ends with a Russian diplomat going through a window and falling to his death. Were they there together-in which case, why was our dearly departed diplomat openly cavorting with a tattooed Russian gangster?-or was the heavy watching the diplomat? Then we have Sokolov’s wife going missing that same morning. Cyclops ends up here, with another Russian wiseguy, and they’ve got at least Daphne Sokolov locked up in the bathroom. Maybe Sokolov, too. The detectives and two men in black show up here, and end up leaking all over the lobby. Then the killers take out our Russian heavies and leave with Daphne, and maybe her husband, too.
Too many maybes.
I bent down to look at the base of the radiator, wondering if she’d been held there, if she’d been cuffed to it and if anyone else had too. It was definitely the best option. The towel rail wouldn’t handle anything with more muscle than a two-year-old. Same for the shower rail. And the base of the toilet, well, that would’ve been just nasty. And cumbersome.
Then I saw something else. On the base of the wall, above the row of tiles that skirted it. Something had been scratched into the paint.
I leaned in for a closer look.
They were letters. Cyrillic letters.
I looked at the watch again. It had a safety-pin fastener, like on a brooch. Which could easily have been used to carve the letters.
“There’s something here,” I told Aparo. “In Russian.”
Aparo got down on his haunches for a closer look. “What does it say?”
“Hang on.” I pulled out my smart phone, launched the Google Search app, and went to Google Translate. I selected Russian to English, brought up the Cyrillic keypad, and typed in the word:
. It came back with what it sounded like, kuvalda, and what it meant in English.
I told Aparo.
He gave me an impressed nod. I nodded back. We both knew what this meant. Daphne Sokolov had definitely been held here. And to find out why, we now knew who to talk to. A Russian mobster who’d been on the Bureau’s radar for years. A smug slimeball by the name of Yuri Mirminsky, nicknamed kuvalda.
The Sledgehammer.
19
Leo Sokolov was back in his ratty hotel room, standing by the grimy window, staring out at the noisy, traffic-clogged street below.
He was angry at himself. He’d almost screwed everything up with his impetuousness, which wasn’t like him. Sokolov wasn’t a rash person. He normally thought things through, took his time. If anything, he was usually overly cautious and analytical. And yet here, faced with a crisis, he’d jumped into the deep end without checking the pool first.
He was lucky to be alive-and free. Very lucky. He thought back to his failed attempt at kidnapping Rogozin and realized how close he was to it all going seriously wrong. He caught a ghostly reflection of his face in the glass and felt a pang of shame and remorse. He chided himself again. He couldn’t do this. Not like that. He’d thought it would work out, his being brazen, as he had been all those years ago, when he’d outwitted his CIA handlers. But this was a different world, and he was a different man.
He couldn’t afford to fail again. He’d need to do better.
And he needed to get help. He couldn’t do it alone. Not anymore.
He didn’t move for more than an hour. He just stood there, in the darkness, staring out into the night, oblivious to the bustle of the city outside his grimy window.
Remembering. Thinking. Searching for an inspiration, for someone he could turn to.
An ally.
Then, out of the confusion in his mind, a name came forth.
He didn’t want to drag anyone else into the chaos of his now-exploded life, but he really didn’t have a choice if he was ever going to see his Daphne again. And who better than someone who, against all of Sokolov’s advice, seemed incapable of doing anything else than dedicating himself to a life of crime.
Jonny.
He needed to find Jonny.
20
The Sledgehammer.
Yet another of the high-quality individuals we’d welcomed to our land of opportunity with open arms, only to end up bitterly, bitterly disappointed.
I’m not sure that he was tired, poor, huddled, or yearning to breathe free when we let him in. In fact, I can’t imagine that the person who rubber-stamped his visa didn’t have a pretty good idea of what kind of lowlife he really was. But we still let him in, and here we were, sixteen years later, wasting time and money investigating his sordid activities and looking for a way to either lock him up-and waste more time and money that way-or kick him back out.
Same old, same old.
Yuri Mirminsky came into the country on a business visa, indicating he’d be working in the movie industry. When we got our first taste of what he was really up to, we discovered that the real reason he’d left Moscow was because it had become too dangerous for him there, what with the savage competition between Mafiya mobsters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, Mirminsky never made it to Hollywood. He got busy right here in New York and was running one of the strongest ROC groups on the whole East Coast.
Yeah, we’ve even got an acronym for it. ROC. Russian organized crime.
Collateral damage from the fall of Communism.
I often wondered if we’d have been better off with the Evil Empire still in place.
The Sledgehammer’s talent was much like Lucky Luciano’s. He was an organizer. He took bit gangs of Russian bangers and stitched them together into one big crime corporation, with him running the show. And his talent served him well. His branch of the Solntsevskaya gang now had more than two hundred upstanding immigrants living among us and beavering away at drug-running, extortion, and a whole bunch of other fine pursuits.
The first time I heard of him, I remember wondering where he got the nickname. My wishful thinking was that he’d been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel. Maybe he was. I mean, back then, who wasn’t? But this sledgehammer was different. It originated from his early days in Russia, before he came to the States. After the Wall came down. Back when he was an out-of-work KGB “niner,” an unemployed member of its Ninth Directorate who’d gone from muscleman providing protection to the Kremlin’s top dogs to up-and-coming bratok-a low-level Mafiya thug. Yuri got into a fight with some poor schmuck and he punched him so hard the guy’s guts spilled out. Literally. The guy had recently had surgery and his stitches hadn’t been out for that long, but still. One punch.