I don’t know about the choice of nickname. I’d have gone with Drago. Or Popeye. But maybe that last one was too American. Besides, the French Connection movie had it locked down. For my generation, anyway.
The problem was, Mirminsky was insulated. I’d never met the guy, but the Bureau had been involved in a couple of cases over the years that linked back to him, the most recent of which was a colossal fraud where Mirminsky and his associates operated dozens of small medical “no-fault” clinics and bilked car-insurance companies out of tens of millions of dollars for fictitious treatments of car-accident victims. We never got anywhere near taking him down. Mirminsky was a smart vor-what Russian Mafiya bosses were called, short for vor y zakone, meaning “thief-in-law”-and he knew how to work the system. He never had any direct involvement with any of his cabal’s dirty deeds. Nothing ever got tied back to him, which is how it was with most, if not all, of the Russian mobsters who’d left the old country for the security and due process of the West. They raped and pillaged, they partied, we watched.
Depressing stuff.
Still, he’d lost two underlings here, which was something to smile about. And he was also clearly involved in whatever had led to the death of two NYPD detectives, which was going to bring down some serious heat on him.
Maybe his days on our sunny shores were numbered.
I wasn’t holding my breath. But I was happy to do everything I could to help bring that about.
“We ought to pay the Sledgehammer a visit,” I told Aparo as we hit traffic on the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. “Rattle his gilded penthouse of a cage.”
Aparo didn’t answer immediately. I glanced across and saw that he had a little grin going.
“What are you smiling about?”
He put on a mock-pensive look, then said, “I think we should. But before we do that, I think we need to rattle someone else’s cage before she gets too much of a heads-up about what just went down.”
I knew exactly what he was thinking. And, in fairness, I’d been thinking the same thing. We also needed to know more about what seemed to be the key to all this: Sokolov. Which was why I called Larisa Tchoumitcheva right there and then and told her we needed to meet, pronto.
“J. G. Melon’s in an hour,” I told Aparo after I hung up with her. Then I added, “I don’t have time to drop you off at the office. York Street subway station good for you?”
His face dropped for only a couple of seconds before he realized I was kidding, but those seconds were priceless.
LARISA HUNG UP WITH Reilly, thought about it, then dialed another number.
Her boss took her call promptly.
“I just got a call from Reilly. He wants to meet.”
“Good,” the man answered. “We need to know more about what happened at the motel. Have you heard anything new?”
“No more than we already know. Koschey took out the two bratki who were watching over Sokolov’s wife.”
“Which means he’s got her now,” the man said. “And he’ll use her to draw Sokolov out.”
“No doubt.”
Larisa’s boss went quiet for a moment, then said, “We can’t let Sokolov slip out of our hands. Do you understand? This is imperative. I can’t emphasize that enough.”
Still with the secrecy, Larisa fumed inwardly. But she knew better than to ask. They’d already made it clear that Sokolov’s CV was beyond her need to know. And so far, her attempts to gain access to his file had failed.
She masked her frustration and said, “I understand.”
“Call me back when you’re done,” he told her. “And Larisa?”
“Yes?”
“Get him to like you.”
21
Koreatown, Manhattan
The train rumbled into Thirty-fourth Street, causing Sokolov to force his eyes open and pull himself to his feet.
He’d spent the whole ride thinking about the eager-to-please sixteen-year-old who had shown so much promise and, in particular, such a flair for science, when he first became Sokolov’s pupil. Sokolov had done everything he could to encourage and help the boy-from after-school coaching to loaning him books from his own collection. But when the change happened, it appeared to take place overnight. Yaung John-Hee-or simply Jonny, without the “h,” as he was known at school-had started off by skipping homework assignments and coming into school late. Then he started missing whole days, and he’d finally ended up getting expelled when a gun was found in his backpack.
How it had gotten there wasn’t cut-and-dry. Not even close.
Jonny had consistently stuck to his story. He said he’d just happened to find the gun in Clearview Park. What complicated the matter was that the Beretta 9mm turned out to be free of prints-except for Jonny’s-and the police to whom it had mandatorily been reported linked it to three deaths. They suspected it actually belonged to Jonny’s older brother, Kim-Jee, a low-level dealer in one of the city’s Korean gangs. And Jonny had a rock-solid alibi for the night of the killings, so the police had nothing with which to pressure him.
At each step, Sokolov had tried to talk the boy around, to try to turn him away from the violent and self-destructive black hole that was drawing him in. At each step, Jonny had pretended to listen, then he’d just continued down his own path. Sokolov had even put himself on the line. He had vouched for the kid with both the school’s principal and the cops when Jonny had been suspected of dealing drugs at the school. He had assured anyone who would listen that Jonny was different from his brother. That he wanted to go to college and become an engineer. That he and Jonny had an understanding. Then, three years ago, there was this business with the gun, and Sokolov couldn’t protect him anymore. Nor did he really want to. He was left looking ridiculous. He was still angry about how Jonny had managed to deceive him so completely, still unsure about whether he had been played the entire time or whether Jonny had honestly tried to stay on the right side of the law but hadn’t been strong enough to resist his brother’s pull.
At the moment, it was that calculating ability to lie that Sokolov was counting on. Perhaps Jonny even had traces of remorse about how he had manipulated Sokolov and rendered him unreliable in the eyes of the school’s board. So much about high school was the ability to read character, and Sokolov, who had always prided himself on his skills in this area, had proven himself fallible.
Sokolov dragged himself up the stairs at Herald Square and set off down Sixth Avenue. The shops were empty and the Empire State Building loomed overhead like a giant sentry. Sokolov tucked his hands deeper into his pockets, where he again felt the cool grip of the handgun. He found it oddly disconcerting that there he was, all that time later, coming to see Jonny, and that it was he who was carrying a gun. Desperate times, desperate measures, he reminded himself, and pushed the discomfort away as he turned onto Thirty-third Street and followed it into the heart of Koreatown.
After the cops had raided the back room of the community center in Murray Hill where the brothers used to hang out, Kim-Jee and Jonny had begun to spend much more time in Koreatown. They’d eventually started working at their aunt’s restaurant, the Green Dragon, which was right in the heart of Koreatown, between Thirty-third and Thirty-second streets. Sokolov had even gone there one night, about two years ago, to try to talk some sense into Jonny yet again, but he’d given up and gone home without even setting foot inside. He’d heard that since then, Kim-Jee had risen through the ranks of the gang, with Jonny riding in his wake. Anything more than that would be a guess. Better to see for himself, now that he was there.