The Good Guys Page 17

  “Yeah, you might be right,” O’Brien agreed. “It doesn’t need to be, except for the fact that on the same day they found Skinny Al doing his Hunchback imitation a Russian professor who had worked with him goes missing and hasn’t been seen since. There’s gotta be a connection there.”

  “That’s what I think too,” Slattery agreed. “So now the question becomes, where does our professor fit into the whole picture?” He paused and glanced at Russo. “Russo, could you go get us some...”

  Her incredulous look cut him off at his ego.

  “I’ll get it,” O’Brien said quickly. “How do you want it?” There was a hot plate in the corner and on it was the perpetual pot of coffee. Slattery wanted his regular. O’Brien poured one regular, one with milk and no sugar for himself, and one for Russo—black and strong.

  “Let’s look at this logically,” Russo said, rising. A blackboard on wheels had been pushed against a side wall. She picked up a stub of yellow chalk and started writing. “Whatta we got? We got an Italian who speaks English. We got a professor who speaks English and Russian. And we got a Russian who may or may not speak English, but definitely speaks Russian.” She drew a lot of arrows. “To me it looks like Gradinsky’s interpreting Russian for the Italians. I don’t know what else it could be.”

  When stressed, Slattery gnawed at the ridge of skin bordering his fingernails. It was a habit that had long ago proved impossible to break. He’d tried everything, from bandages to Mercurochrome, but nothing had worked. It’s easy to stop doing it, Slattery liked to tell people, paraphrasing Mark Twain on smoking—in fact, I’ve already done it fifty or sixty times. So as he sat there watching Russo write down her equation, he started biting his skin. “Let’s just say you’re right, okay?” he said when she finished. “That still doesn’t get us any closer to the professor.”

  O’Brien was slowly stirring his coffee with his finger. “Here’s the thing that I don’t get. What do the Italians need the Russians for? They already control pretty much every place except Brighton Beach, and they sure as hell ain’t going to the mattresses for that. So? What?” They were stuck at the intersection of Mafia and Russian Mob without any idea which way to go. He picked up the third report in the file, asking, “What’s this one?”

  Russo ignored his questions. “At least we got some idea how the professor fits into the whole picture.” She drew an arc from Italian to Russian. “It turns out the professor is the missing link.”

  O’Brien just couldn’t resist. “And all this time I thought that was Arnold Schwarzenegger.” After pausing briefly for the laugh that never came, he repeated his question to Slattery. “What else we got here?”

  What they had were the initial results of the expanded investigation Slattery had initiated. The FBI’s New York field office was second in size and budget only to the Washington, D.C., headquarters. Approximately twelve hundred agents were assigned to New York, and at any point they would be working about 25,000 different cases, ranging in importance from interstate car theft to national security. These agents had about five thousand regularly paid informants and maybe another five thousand who would drop a dime when necessary. In addition to O’Brien and Russo, four agents had been assigned temporarily to this case, which for administrative purposes had been designated MisPro, obviously meaning “missing professor.”

  An actual FBI investigation isn’t nearly as intricate as usually dramatized by television or in the movies. There isn’t a whole lot of trickery or cleverness involved. Mostly it’s just a lot of hard work. Almost every investigation begins with the collection of a massive amount of readily available information. Telephone numbers to middle names. These four agents were doing the basic background work, gathering all the material necessary to create a snapshot of Professor Peter Gradinsky at this moment in his life. The material included his personal data provided by the university, transcripts of interviews conducted a day earlier with four of his colleagues in the Slavic Studies Department, a graduate assistant, and two West End Avenue neighbors, telephone and credit card records and canceled checks for the previous three months. Among the receipts was a copy of the seventy-five-dollar charge from the Heights Tavern.

  O’Brien and Russo spent several minutes reading the summary: Peter Edmund Gradinsky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, George, had emigrated to America from what was then the Ukraine prior to World War II. He settled in Cleveland, sponsored by a distant cousin. It was there he met and married Beatrice Miller of Shaker Heights. Three years after Peter was born they had a second child, a daughter they named Diana. Diana was currently living in Chicago with her husband, Charles Berkow, a commodities trader. The family had lived on Chicago’s West Side. Peter attended public elementary and secondary schools, graduating from the High School for the Humanities. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1960 from Colgate University, a highly competitive liberal arts college in upstate New York, where he majored in political science. It was at Colgate, in the midst of the cold war, that he became fascinated by Russian culture. He received his postgraduate degree in Russian language studies from Columbia, intending to work as a translator for a multinational corporation doing business with the Soviet Union, but instead accepted an offer to stay at the university and teach. He supplemented his income as a freelance translator for corporations, among them U.S. Steel and IBM, as well as the State Department, and had earned a minor literary reputation for his acclaimed translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. After a perfunctory FBI investigation nine years earlier he had received a Secret clearance, enabling him to work for the government. There was no indication that he had had access to any sensitive government materials, nothing that might be of interest to a foreign government. Most of his work had been done for the Department of Commerce involving trade agreements . . .

  This went on for another page, listing more details of his life, including his degrees, honors, and a long list of clubs and organizations to which he belonged, ranging from Who’s Who Among American Professors to the American Society of Professional Translators to AAA. Using the shorthand he’d invented, COB, O’Brien copied much of this information into his notebook.

  As they read the material, Slattery excused himself to return to his office, telling them, “I got to call Washington. Apparently they didn’t find my folder where it was supposed to be lost, so I’m still persona nonexistent.”

  From the interviews with the other members of his department, it became clear that Gradinsky was well respected and reasonably well liked, but that he had no close friends among his peers. He was considered an excellent teacher and was popular with his students. While no one considered him to be the star of the department, he was described as “reliable,” “dependable,” “extremely hardworking,” and “solid, a rock.” His teaching style was described as “the usual,” “without any real flair,” and “appropriate.” No one knew anything about his tastes in music, movies, or even television. He was considered “extremely supportive” of his students and was known for spending hours of his free time working with students who needed additional help. In fact, his graduate assistants liked to hang out in his office, which was described by the one graduate student who had been interviewed as “overflowing with piles of paperwork that he would put on the floor if somebody really needed a place to sit down.”

  Without exception everyone described him as passionate about his work and a very private person. Only a few of his colleagues had ever met his wife, and none of them had ever been to his home, or even knew of anyone else in the department who had been. The exception was Geraldine Simon. Her duties as departmental secretary included answering his phone when he wasn’t in the office and scheduling his appointments. The professor paid her a little extra to take care of the scheduling and billing for his freelance work. Simon spoke to Grace Gradinsky regularly, mostly about such matters. She had been to the Gradinsky apartment several times, usually to drop off materials, but she had been invited to dinner on two oc
casions. In her interview she referred to him as “a true gentleman.”

  Geri Simon also mentioned that she had noticed minor changes in him the past few months. He seemed somewhat distracted, she said, occasionally missing appointments and misplacing personal items. He had also been doing a lot more freelance work, which kept him out of the office more often than usual. And for the first time, he insisted on personally handling the billing and payments for this work. Simon remembered that among the companies for which he’d worked were Random House, Time Inc., McDonnell Douglas, and Pan Am. There were several more that she could not remember, and she did not recall him working for any private clients. He didn’t seem to be spending more money than usual—in fact, she’d laughed at that question, responding, “More money than usual?”—but she did point out that she was probably not the right person to ask about that.

  It took them much of the afternoon to dig through all the material. They drank lunch, bottled water for Russo, Coke and coffee for O’Brien. And from time to time, as they worked, Russo found herself sneaking glances at him, as if she were back in the library at Ohio State being very careful not to get caught peeking at the Buckeyes’ star running back. She noticed that O’Brien would occasionally leaf back through his notebook, sometimes spending several minutes searching until he found what he was looking for. “Anything?” she asked once.

  He responded with a half-shrug, which she interpreted as a good strong maybe. “I don’t know yet. Tell you later.”

  Slattery returned later that afternoon, still officially lost. “All right, here’s what’s going on,” he said, still charged with enthusiasm. “This Russian connection has gotten the assistant director’s attention. He’s calling out the cavalry. He wants to know what’s the big deal about Thursday night. So for the next six days this gets a Priority designation, meaning we pretty much get whatever support we need.”

  A Priority designation. That was a big deal. Washington was watching. This case definitely had the potential to move their careers—but depending on the outcome, that move could be either up or down. Slattery helped them lay out a strategy. All the agents in the city working either organized crime or counterintelligence would be asked to squeeze their informants for rumors as well as facts. As all three of them knew, within organized crime rumors tended to be the shadows of facts. Transcripts of conversations that had taken place in the Freemont Avenue Social Club over the past six weeks would be reviewed to see if any leads might have been overlooked, as would all surveillance reports covering members of both Franzone’s and Cosentino’s crews.

  The bureau liaison to the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit would reach out to his counterpart to see if they’d felt this particular breeze, although Slattery agreed with O’Brien and Russo that at least for the present the cops would not be brought into the case. Personally none of them had anything against the cops—there were some fine detectives in the NYPD—but the reality was that the 25,000-cop force leaked information worse than a roof made of old newspapers.

  As the afternoon began easing into evening, and they finally began collecting all the paperwork and cleaning up the conference room, Slattery remembered to ask Laura Russo, “That thing last night, you sure you’re okay?”

  Fine, she told him.

  Even after all these years Slattery was still not entirely comfortable treating male and female agents equally. “You know, if you’d feel more comfortable staying in a hotel tonight, the office’ll pick up the tab.”

  She flashed him her most demure look. “Why, you old softie you.”

  Slattery actually blushed. He averted his face so she wouldn’t see it, but she did. “Anyway,” he continued, “we’re gonna keep the watchers outside your place for a few days. But I doubt whoever it was is coming back.”

  When they finally got outside, Russo glanced at her watch. It was still much too early for it to have been such a long day. They walked around the corner to the Mountway Deli. O’Brien preferred it because its booths offered at least a hint of privacy. The city was in the midst of its daily transition from day to play. The streets were jammed with people on their way home or to restaurants, movies, concerts, sports events—the many million places for fun in New York—where they would resume the lives they’d left behind that morning.

  To Russo it just seemed like everybody was racing somewhere important. Like the whole world was on the way to an exciting party to which she hadn’t been invited. Her life seemed stuck in one gear: Special Agent Laura Russo. She was her job; her job was her. Lately the only differences between day and night in her life were the light and the temperature. The only male in her life was Buck, and he had four legs, a tail, and slept on her head. It’s my choice, she reminded herself, my choice, my choice, my choice.

  As they settled into a booth, O’Brien took his notebook from his jacket pocket. Folded sheets of paper he’d stuffed between specific pages started falling out. When he tried to catch them, other papers did the same. Then the book seemed to leap out of his hand, and as he grabbed for it, still more papers fell out. Russo started laughing and didn’t stop even when she realized the whole thing was an act performed for her benefit.

  “Don’t give up your day job,” she advised him, patting his hand with mock sympathy. And then she added, “Or your night job.”

  He collected all his papers, unfolded them, put them in a pile, and ironed them flat with his hand. “There,” he said, beaming proudly like a little kid.

  That was part of his act too, she knew. But still it was cute. “What?”

  “There,” he said, pointing at the papers. “There’s your real Professor Gradinsky.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  He made an exaggerated show of letting his eyes roam slowly up and down her body. Then, holding up his palms in protest, he said, “Boy, that is definitely not true.”

  This time it was Russo who felt the rising warmth of embarrassment—and cut it off. “Ha, ha, ha,” she said as sarcastically as possible. “Okay, Agent O’Brien, let’s see what you got.”

  “Okay. What I got is a whole lot of right angles that don’t make a square.” A waiter stood silently by the table, his order book poised for action. O’Brien looked up at him. “Look, we’re a little busy right now saving the world. Give us a few minutes.” The waiter nodded seriously and retreated. Connor continued, “Here, look at this. This is the list of clubs that he belongs to. Notice anything a little strange?”

  She read down the list but nothing popped out. “What?”

  “Remember how Grace told us they didn’t own a car? There was no reason for her to lie about that. It’s too easy to check. So now you tell me, how many guys you know who don’t own a car belong to the American Automobile Association?” He grinned proudly, showing her his teeth. “First thing we need to do is get somebody at Triple A to pull his membership card and get the plate number and model of the car he’s got registered with them.”

  “Let me have some paper,” she said. He pulled a clean sheet from his notebook and handed it to her. She began making her own notes.

  He continued, “So we know he’s not exactly the guy his wife told us he was. Then this next thing. Look how people described him.” He quoted from the reports: plain, mostly; nothing spectacular. “Now look at this.” He dug out several canceled checks from his paper pile. “So how come he’s spending $640 here, $235 here, here’s one for almost $400, all in Bloomingdale’s men’s department?”

  Russo still didn’t get it. “He’s buying clothes, I guess.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, “I guess so too. Russo, you’re a woman, so let me ask you this. Why would a man who for his whole life apparently has shown no interest in clothes suddenly start shopping for a new wardrobe at Bloomies?”

  She got it. “You think he’s got a girlfriend, don’t you?”

  “There you go. It all fits. Remember what that secretary, Simon, said in her statement? He’s been acting differently lately, missing appointments, misplacing things.” He p
aused, then said emphatically, “Taking care of his own finances at the office, because if good old Grace doesn’t know how much comes in, then she sure as hell doesn’t know how much goes out. And notice that he’s paying by check instead of using his credit card. I’ll bet I know who sees the credit card bill and who gets his canceled checks.” He started humming the first bars of “On the Street Where You Live,” trusting that Laura would know that in My Fair Lady that song was sung by a love-crazed character.

  While Russo had a lot of faith in mankind, her experiences had taught her to have a lot less faith in individual men. She had learned from her former husband that married men do have affairs. In that situation apparently the only thing the other woman had that she didn’t was a criminal record, which made it even tougher to understand. In so many ways that experience had shaped every day thereafter. But the Professor Peter Gradinsky who had been created in her mind just didn’t seem like that type. That Gradinsky had been solid, a bit of a nerd. He didn’t seem real desirable. She frowned and thought, they fool you.

  The waiter returned. “Excuse me,” he said. “You people finished saving the world?” Once again his pen was poised for business against his order book.

  Russo found herself anticipating O’Brien’s response to that straight line. It was like throwing a slow ball to Babe Ruth. “Yeah,” he said, handing over the menu, “I’ll have a burger, please. Medium.”

  “That’s it?” she said to him, actually disappointed.

  “I’m not that hungry,” he explained, then added, “And give me a cherry Coke too, please.”