“Didn’t Hitler have a similar idea?”
“Very droll.”
“So you need to stand out.”
“Exactly. If I can put away a suitably big name, such as our boy Andreyevich, well that’s an impressive scalp. People take notice of a catch like that. Then…” he said, taking a seat on the other side of the desk and leaning back in Burke’s chair. “Then I’ll be a shoe in. And don’t think I won’t remember my friends.” He nodded at Burke, who felt as though someone had poured a bucket of ice water down his back. He sincerely hoped Edwards would not remember him.
“The problem we have right now is the bugger isn’t saying very much is he.”
“No indeed,” Burke agreed. “The Bratva don’t.”
“How so?” Edwards asked, not knowing quite what he was being told.
“The Bratva or the brotherhood…”
“I know what it is roughly. I’ve even played the video game.”
Did people still play video games? Burke wondered if Edwards also liked to hang out at the local discotheque, while trying to chat up the local dolly birds or crumpet or some other seventies-ism for women. “Well, you’ll know who they are,” he replied.
“Of course. Russian Mafia. I’ve only been looking into their activities for the past year.”
“Well, yes. In this case Lithuanian of course but on the right track.”
“So he’s not talking because he swore some kind of oath to his Mafia chums and they might come and do him in on that basis. Seems fairly obvious. There are a good many of these shady business types who claim some kind of tenuous connection on the basis it gives them some kind of associated kudos. It’s no secret Andreyevich is in deeper than that and connected to something big. Honour among thieves is a myth though in my somewhat vast experience. Clearly there’s a war going on out there; first Vlad, then the body down in Leith and now Karpov all of which points in Andreyevich’s direction, given that that he’s connected to and probably owns Karpov’s holding company and Vlad was definitely linked to Karpov, who, let’s face it, was a total fucking enigma, there is a connection there. He just may turn out to be the kingpin and I want to take him down. It’s a fortuitous wind that blew him in our direction. I doubt he’s actually connected to the murders directly and frankly that’s not my issue, but if we can use what he’s in for and the murders as leverage, maybe offer him some kind of protection, we can certainly have a go at twisting his arm. If he knows, or at least thinks he knows he’s going down, and let’s face it, he has no way of knowing we don’t do wild-west justice over here, he might lift the lid on the whole shooting match. All we have to do is make him feel at home and think that the same standards apply here. Do you know how much coke there is on the streets right now?”
Burke shook his head.
“Well I do and let me tell you it’s not a trifling matter and not just something that’s gonna blow over at any moment. And do you know where it’s all coming from?”
Again Burke shook his head.
“Well neither does anyone else and that’s the point. While it’s good for business so to speak in the sense that it keeps all of us in a job, it’s one that seems more and more like treading water in a bog on a daily basis. I want out. I want to catch the big fish and Andreyevich has the look of the prize Marlin about him. We have to convince him to talk while we have him here.”
“That might be your problem.”
“How so?”
“I don’t think he’ll ever talk.”
“Why the defeatist attitude? There’s always a way. We just need to push the right buttons. As I say, fear must be the best motivation we have; fear of the unknown. If we can convince him we can protect him from the bigger players back home we’re in. And the lawyer didn’t look much cop. He’s never even been in this situation before. Just keep plugging away Jim. That’s all we have to do.”
“He’s not keeping schtum because he’s scared.”
“Then why else? An oath? I don’t buy it.” He scoffed and then inhaled deeply before letting out the sigh of a man frustrated by a lack of cooperation.
“It doesn’t matter whether you buy into it or not. What matters is what he buys into.”
“Ok,” Edwards sighed, “I’ll humour you. Go on.”
“We’ve, or rather you’ve established that Andreyevich and Karpov are involved in some way.”
“Undoubtedly. I’m certain Andreyevich owns the majority of the venture capitalist firm who own Karpov’s portfolio of companies. It’s a murky trail I grant you but we have had some forensic accountants look into it and the paper trail so far as I can tell, or more importantly as far as they can tell, looks to lead back to Lithuania and Andreyevich.”
“And what do you know about Andreyevich’s background?”
“Businessman.” Edwards coughed conveying his thoughts on this. “Known to have been involved in some fairly ropey property deals back in the mother country, where local officials who got in the way then got vanished, that kind of thing. Further back, known to have been someone who could get his hands on things. Had a reputation as a top class thief. Records are not quite what they might be. He goes off grid for some time in his late teens and early twenties, thought to have been doing time. Hazard of the job in the tea leaf trade. On the surface there’s nothing to link him to anything, but there are always stories, intelligence from the ground that hasn’t been officially documented. Things he’s ordered done to people’s families. One official tried to block a development in Vilnius, our boy’s home town. His whole family went missing for a month. When they did begin to show up, it was in instalments and I mean small instalments, in the mail. As a warning to others I’d say that was fairly effective, especially when no ransom note was ever attached and no demands were ever communicated.”
“Ok, so we know he spent time in prison.”
“We’re pretty much certain of that.”
“Well, going on Karpov it looks likely, and again I know what you mean about the murky records situation, believe me, I find it hard to trace very much on him without probably sending someone out there, and frankly we don’t have the funds. The surgeon’s coming back in here this afternoon with a solicitor of his choosing. Let’s hope he’s not doing any nervous boob jobs or face lifts and that no one gets stabbed in the eye with a wayward Botox needle in the mean-time. You could just about peel the Karpov’s skin off and stick it to the wall to get the edited highlights of his life story in hieroglyphics.”
“Really?” Edwards asked. “Into Egyptology was he?”
“A more local form of artwork. Russian or at least eastern bloc prison tattoos, all of which tell a story.”
“The fact he has them surely tells a story all of its own.”
“It does, but more specifically, each of the symbols has a different meaning.” Burke switched on his laptop and waited as it powered up and tried to connect to the internet via a dongle that had to wage a war with the pub’s thick stone walls.
“And what’s to stop the wannabe just inking himself with whatever symbol they feel the need to display, assuming they wanted to get a step further up the hierarchy without doing the leg work? It’d be a quick way to do it.”
“It’s strictly enforced by the prison gangs. They’ve been known to cut out the piece of flesh containing the tattoo or even beat people to death for less.”
He waited some more. Finally when the net was accessible again and he was able to read his emails he saw the one from Doc Brown with around fifty attached Jpegs, each showing a different chapter in Karpov’s extensively inked back story, reading to the trained eye like an odyssey of crime.