The Good Guys Read online

  Both agents took their hands off their weapons. Park Avenue had become a band of a thousand car horns. Drivers who could not possibly see what was taking place had picked up the cry and were leaning on their horns. Over the racket O’Brien pointed to the curb and told the young woman, “Pull the car over there.”

  Russo shouted to him, “I’m going to get your car.”

  The woman edged the car to the curb. O’Brien noticed that the ends of her medium-length light brown hair were curled in that brainy coed style. He couldn’t see her body but ventured a guess anyway: twenty-three and tells the truth about her age to the day.

  Russo completely ignored the venom other drivers were hurling at her. Instead, she felt liberated. She was an extremely responsible person, an FBI agent, sensitive to the needs of other people. No one who knew her would believe she was capable of abandoning a car in the middle of rush hour. But she’d done exactly that. She’d done it. As she slid back into the driver’s seat, she glanced into the rearview mirror. She could see the driver of the car directly behind her. His face was scrunched up and his mouth was moving rapidly. She couldn’t hear him, but she had a really good idea what he was saying. Or, actually, screeching. She watched him for a few seconds, then opened the window and stuck her middle finger victoriously into the air, feeling very much like she was on her way to becoming a true New Yorker.

  “Special Agent O’Brien. FBI,” he told the young woman, flashing his badge. “Can I see the registration for this car, please?”

  “Really?” she said. “FBI?”

  “Really,” he told her. “Now, let me see the registration, please.”

  “Why? Was I doing something wrong?” she asked, fumbling through her thick wallet. She smiled at him. “I mean, I couldn’t exactly have been speeding, right?”

  “No.” He smiled back. “Just let me—”

  “I know, I didn’t signal when I changed lanes, did I?” She continued searching the compartments of her wallet, which seemed to be leaking slips of paper from every pocket. “It’s got to be here,” she said, almost to herself. Then she stopped and looked right at him. “Are you really FBI?”

  “Yeah, really. C’mon, show me the registration.” She was quite attractive in a youthfully exuberant way, Connor decided. He knew the type: a young woman certain of her abilities and confident that success and recognition were only a few years away.

  Meanwhile, Russo had taken one very big breath and cut over to the curb. As she got out of O’Brien’s car, the driver of the Buick that had been caught behind her put down his passenger window and screamed at her, “You bitch.”

  She didn’t hesitate, shouting right back at him, “You prick!” and feeling very good about it.

  The young woman driving the professor’s car sighed, snapped closed the purse on her lap, looked sheepishly at O’Brien, and, as he described such behavior, tried to “cute her way” out of a problem. “It’s not really my car,” she admitted. “I don’t have the registration.”

  He did have to admit that she was sort of cute—in a confrontational way. “All right, then, whose car is it?”

  She averted her eyes. “Well, he’s sort of my boyfriend.”

  O’Brien locked a pleasant expression on his face. He had no intention of providing any information to her. He wanted to create a vacuum of information and let her rush in to fill it. “Okay, what’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  Russo joined them at the car window and identified herself as an FBI agent. The young woman smiled at her too, seemingly impressed.

  O’Brien told Russo, “She doesn’t have the registration with her. Says it’s her boyfriend’s car, not hers.”

  Russo asked the young woman, “What’s your name?”

  “Natalie Speakman.”

  “And what’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  In an instant Natalie Speakman’s attention shifted from O’Brien to Russo. Abandoning cute, she went directly for sisterhood. “I think you know that already. That’s obviously why you stopped me, isn’t it? See, here’s my problem,” she appealed to Russo. “His wife doesn’t know about . . . you know, about us. He said he was going to tell her, but if she finds out and—”

  Russo was coldly professional. “Stop. Please. I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I asked you for was his name. I don’t care about the details, I just want a name.”

  “You know who it is. Peter Gradinsky,” Natalie admitted. “Look, this is really embarrassing for me. He’s my mentor at Columbia, and if his wife finds out about us, she’ll . . . This is ridiculous. I mean, you’re his . . .” She sobbed two, three, four times, then burst into tears.

  “Look, Natalie,” O’Brien began sympathetically.

  Russo gently pushed him aside. She leaned into the car, inches from the young girl’s face. “Stop it right now,” she ordered. “We don’t have time for it. We need some answers from you, you got it?” When the girl failed to respond, Russo repeated firmly, “Got it?”

  Natalie gulped, then looked at Russo and nodded.

  “Let me explain the situation to you,” she told Speakman. “You’re driving a car that belongs to a missing person. You don’t have the registration. Believe me, we can cause you some serious problems. But I’m going to offer you a choice. You can either come back to the office with us and call your lawyer from there, or you can come with me right now and answer a few questions.”

  “But I need to talk to you,” she insisted. “I want to.”

  “Fine. Good.” Russo stood up and looked around. She spotted a parking garage just around the next corner. She told O’Brien to get in the Z and park it in that lot.

  O’Brien did as directed. He was quite impressed at Russo’s ability to play good cop, bad cop. Or, as he decided would be more accurate in this instance, good cop, bad copess. Russo and Speakman followed him into the garage in his car. Minutes later the three of them were sitting in a booth in a coffee shop.

  “Okay, now,” Russo said, “let’s hear it. What are you doing with Gradinsky’s car?”

  “I just want you to find him,” Speakman said.

  “Then answer my questions,” Russo told her. She reached across the table and put a reassuring hand on Natalie’s, and in a much softer voice added, “We want to find him too. But we’ve got to have your help.”

  If O’Brien hadn’t seen Russo do almost exactly the same thing with Grace Gradinsky, taking her hand and holding it, he would have sworn it was heartfelt. Coughing into his cupped hands to hide an appreciative smile, he opened his notebook.

  Speakman surrendered. She was working toward her master’s in Russian literature, she explained, and had been Gradinsky’s graduate assistant for almost a year. They had started dating a month after they’d met. “You know what I mean,” she said to Russo, making quotation marks in the air. “Dating?”

  Both agents acknowledged that they understood.

  Absolutely no one knew about their relationship, Natalie continued, especially his wife. At least once a month, sometimes more, he’d told his wife that he had to go to some secret meeting, which would allow them to spend a night or two together in her apartment. He’d bought the car several months earlier, paying for it in cash, but that was a big secret too. She kept it for him. That’s why she had the keys and was driving it. He was such an extraordinary man, she rhapsodized, sensitive, caring, open. His passion, she explained, was the Russian language.

  O’Brien studied her as she rambled on about Peter Gradinsky. Yeah, right, he thought, the Russian language and a few other things. Her description of Gradinsky had about as much resemblance to anything O’Brien and Russo knew about him as would his portrait painted by Jackson Pollock.

  “You want to tell us where he is?” Russo asked gently. An interesting way to ask that question, O’Brien noted, as it assumed she knew the answer.

  “I don’t know, honest,” the young woman claimed. “The last time I spoke to him was more than a week ago. I called him and told him I needed to
see him. We were supposed to meet for lunch.” She exhaled. “He never showed up. That’s the last time I spoke to him.”

  O’Brien was surprised. “You called him at home?”

  Her answer seemed obvious. “Sure, I called him there all the time. I’m his assistant. I mean, if I hadn’t called him at home sometimes, Grace . . . his wife?”

  “We know,” Russo affirmed.

  Natalie continued, “She definitely would have suspected something was going on. Don’t you think? Like when I talked to her, I would make up this boyfriend I supposedly was going out with and I’d make up all these details.” She smiled demurely. “His name is Simon and he was . . . he is a carpenter. I didn’t want him to be one of those intellectual types.”

  Russo laughed, a little too hard to be natural, O’Brien thought, then she said, “I can’t believe it. I did the same thing when I was in college. I made up a boyfriend just to get my mother off my back. Only mine was a crusading journalist, a muckraker.”

  “You remember his name?” Natalie asked.

  “Sure I do.” Russo blushed. “Alex Newman.” She chuckled at the memory, then repeated his name. Russo then asked Natalie if she believed those secret meetings actually took place. “Oh yeah,” Natalie said firmly. “Absolutely. Peter told me everything. You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what?” O’Brien asked.

  “Wow, that’s weird,” she continued. “Peter told me he was working for you guys. For the FBI, as an interpreter. He said he went to meetings that the FBI had with Russians. He was interpreting for you guys.”

  “And you believed him?” Russo asked.

  She nodded vigorously. “Oh, absolutely. Peter never lied to me. Never,” she insisted. “Why? You don’t think it’s true?” She smiled knowingly at both of them. “I mean, come on, let’s look at the facts here. Why else would you people be trying to find a missing college professor?”

  O’Brien answered, “Well, Natalie, the bureau’s a big place. We don’t know everybody who works for us. I’m sure it’s possible.” He looked to Russo for support. “Right?”

  “Of course it is,” she agreed. She explained to Speakman, “They just told us to find him. They didn’t tell us why.”

  “Well, I’ve known Peter for almost a year. And he’s not the kind of person to lie.” She caught herself, then added, “Except, you know, when it’s absolutely necessary. Like to Grace. But I’m absolutely positive everything he told me is true.”

  O’Brien asked, “Let me ask you this, then. Did he ever tell you anything about these meetings with the Russians?”

  Connor really hadn’t expected much of an answer, so he was quite surprised when he got a good one. “Uh-huh, yeah, he told me all about them. He even described some of the Russians who were there. There were like these two Russians. What was his name?” As she scanned her memory, neither Connor nor Laura dared move. “Vasily,” she finally remembered, “Vasily something. Peter always called him Vaseline because that’s how smooth he was. Peter told me about his accent. Peter’s very good with accents, you know. Vaseline wasn’t from Moscow, he said. He said he was probably from somewhere in the Ukraine.”

  O’Brien was writing furiously. “He say anything about the other guy?”

  “Barney Ruble?” She laughed at that thought. “That’s what Peter called him, Barney Ruble because he said he looked just like that character in The Flintstones, Barney Rubble. He said he had blond hair, a real big nose, and he didn’t have a neck. The big difference, he said, was that Barney Rubble was smarter.”

  Russo chuckled pleasantly. “Peter sounds like quite a guy,” she said, sounding so sincere that O’Brien almost believed her.

  “Oh, he is, he is.” In response to another question from Russo, with whom she was clearly bonding, she said that Peter told her the meetings were held in a lot of different places. “Like one night he went to this diner on Route 3 in New Jersey, a couple of times he had to go all the way out to Brighton Beach, once they met in this big room in the back of an old gas station. Then there was”—she grimaced, trying to remember—“Little Italy, I think, one night . . .”

  Watching Natalie open up so completely to Laura Russo, Connor couldn’t help but admire the younger woman’s complete loyalty to Gradinsky. The fact was that during his own undergraduate years he’d known a dozen Natalie Speakmans, girls who maintained a fierce faith in their own vision of the world. In that world he usually played the part of the mirthful cynic, but a cynic who just might possibly be converted by the love of a nubile young woman. It worked for everyone involved. No hard feelings. Nobody got hurt. He looked at Natalie and considered it: Yep, he decided, under very different circumstances he could definitely play in her world.

  And then he glanced at Laura Russo, leaning forward, intense, operating simultaneously on three, maybe four different levels. Doing so well exactly what they had been taught—she had become the person the subject needed her to be.

  Russo glanced at him, indicating that it was his turn to ask a question. In his reverie he’d lost his connection to the interview. He had no idea what Russo had just asked. “Okay, good,” he said, hoping that made some sense. “Did he ever tell you what they discussed at these meetings?”

  Natalie nodded. “Yes, definitely. But he told me I couldn’t discuss it with anyone. It was mostly economic negotiations, he said. They were talking about selling billions of dollars’ worth of oil.” She emphasized the word “billions,” to ensure that it would not be mistaken for “millions.”

  “Billions,” O’Brien repeated. “Wow, that’s a lot.” Russo kicked his calf with her foot under the table.

  But the young woman agreed with him. “He used to joke about borrowing a few million. He said they’d never miss it.”

  “Natalie”—it was Russo’s turn—“did Peter ever claim he was involved with the Mafia?”

  She laughed. “Oh yeah, I forgot all about that. Yes, yes, he did. He told me he knew some of the boys.” She put her index finger against the side of her nose and pushed it to the side. “If I knew what he meant.” She waived the possibility away. “That was the one thing I really wondered about, Peter and the Mafia? What did he need them for?” She said the “them” with disdain.

  They asked her several more questions, but that was pretty much the extent of her knowledge. It was likely she was telling the truth, that she didn’t know where he was. They traded telephone numbers, and O’Brien and Russo walked her back to the garage.

  Later, as they drove uptown, Russo asked, “You hear that thing she said? About borrowing a few million? You don’t think he really did something that stupid, do you?”

  O’Brien considered that. “Well, he might have considered it, but I don’t think he was ever in a position to get his hands on that kind of money.” They drove in silence for a few minutes, then O’Brien started laughing.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Newman? New man? That was the best you could do?”

  “Well, it could’ve been true,” Russo responded. “So now let me ask you a question. You think she’s cute?”

  He made a face. “She’s all right, I guess.” He wondered if there could possibly be a right answer to that question.

  Russo agreed. “Well, I thought she was attractive.” She cleared her throat. “Did you notice anything . . . you know, special or different about her?”

  He thought about that. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  It was Russo’s turn to laugh at men’s insensitivity. At least this specific man. “Are you telling me you didn’t even notice she was pregnant?”

  ELEVEN

  Benny Rags was hanging on the wall, screaming loudly for help, when Bobby walked into the Freemont Avenue Social Club. He was making so much noise that it wasn’t even necessary for Bobby to turn up the volume on the radio. “Jesus H.,” Bobby said, cringing at his yelling. “Please. Somebody turn that guy down.”

  Little Eddie put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a loud
, shrill bolt of sound. “Benny! Shut the fuck up or I swear to God, I’ll leave you hanging there all day.”

  “Bobby, help me out here,” Benny pleaded, trying desperately to maintain his dignity. “Guy’s fucking crazy. Hey, get me down and I got a great shirt for you, no kidding.”

  “I don’t know, Benny. I thought you liked hanging around with all of us.” Bobby took off his hat and handed it to him. Instinctively Benny took it. “Here. Make yourself useful. And don’t go getting it dirty.”

  Over the laughter Benny said, “That ain’t funny. I swear to God I ain’t never coming around here with clothes again. Go ahead, pay full price for all I care.”

  It turned out Benny had come around with a carton of velour zip-up tops. When Little Eddie demanded his money back for the cheap Banlon shirts he’d bought, Benny had the cojones to tell him that his business was strictly cash-and-carry. To which Little Eddie responded that if Benny didn’t refund his cash, they were going to have to carry him out.

  That forced Benny to gently remind Little Eddie that he had never actually paid cash for the shirts, so technically he wasn’t entitled to a refund. Little Eddie told him that he wasn’t interested in all that technical bullshit, he just wanted his money back. That was when Eddie picked up Benny and hung him by his shirt on the coat hook. For a short time Benny had flailed around like Road Runner just after discovering he’d run off a cliff into midair, but then he’d given up until Bobby walked in.

  Bobby had been really surprised. Until that moment he hadn’t believed that a coat hook was strong enough to support a person, even a skinny guy like Benny. But there he was, hanging there.

  When Benny finally shut up, Georgie continued the story he’d been telling. “So like I was saying, Frankie Pits started a superstructure job. Gees, this is going back gotta be fifteen years ago, with all these guys from the union. I went on the job and I knocked them all off. I got my own guys, am I right? So Frankie says to me, ‘You can’t knock my men off.’ I said to him, ‘I can’t knock your men off. Fucking watch me.’ I forget who was delivering the concrete. Mileto maybe.”