The Good Guys Read online

  “Yeah? And?”

  “Remember what we said, don’t assume? Well, just suppose it wasn’t that call.”

  He named that tune. “I like that,” he said enthusiastically. “I don’t know if you’re right or not, but I like it.”

  “Think about it,” she said emphatically. And then Russo sang the whole song for him. It turned out to be the old Hank Williams hit “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” “Gradinsky’s at home with his wife when Natalie calls to tell him the good news.” She self-corrected that thought: “Or maybe the bad news, depending on which end of the phone you’re on. She’s pregnant, and what’s worse for the not-so-good professor, she’s thrilled about it. The only thing he can think about is what’s going to happen to his marriage and his career when Grace finds out about it. So he decides that the best thing for him to do is take off for a little while. Let things cool down a little.”

  “So where does Cosentino fit?”

  “That’s my point. That’s where we were wrong. He doesn’t. Interpreting for the Mafia was just like some kind of part-time job to Gradinsky. Who knows what he was thinking? Maybe he figures that if he doesn’t show up, they’ll just go ahead and get somebody else. It probably never even occurred to him that they would wonder what happened to him. That maybe the Russians grabbed him. I’ll bet you he doesn’t even know that the whole world’s out there looking for him.”

  O’Brien finally squeezed past the Con Ed site. As a kid reading science fiction he’d loved the concept of two alternate universes occupying the same space at the same time but in different dimensions. What he never anticipated was that there really would be alternate universes, one inhabited by men, the other by women. In Guy World the facts as he knew them allowed only one conclusion: The mild-mannered university professor was fleeing for his life from the Mafia or Russian gangsters. In Girl World the killers were an afterthought; it was the wrath of women that had caused him to take off. It was astonishing to him that these worlds could be coexisting right in front of his eyes and he wouldn’t even notice it. “Okay, let’s say that’s true. So why would he go to an old girlfriend’s place?”

  Laura looked at him as if he were visiting from another universe. The answer was so obvious she was amazed he couldn’t see it. “What are you talking about? It’s absolutely the perfect place to hide. You really think his wife or Natalie would ever call an old girlfriend to ask if she knew where he was? And have to admit that he’d walked out on them?” She dismissed the thought with light laughter. “Trust me, there’s more chance of me becoming king of England. And I guarantee you that the old girlfriend is so flattered that he still needs her that she’s happy to take him in for a while.” She sneered at him disdainfully, “Ugh, men.”

  He laughed softly, shaking his head. She reminded him just a little of Mops, whom he had once described in a college essay as the only person he’d ever known who could figure out an orderly pattern in the Milky Way. If there was a loophole in Russo’s reasoning, he couldn’t find it. “You’ve got all this figured out, don’t you?”

  “It’s logical, isn’t it? I mean, think about it.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, refusing to commit. Woman’s logic, he thought firmly.

  Em Monroe was the first name on the list. She had worked for Gradinsky for six months, and then they had to let her go. “That was five years ago,” Geri told Russo, then added, “I don’t want to say they were an intense six months, but there’s still claw marks in the walls from the day they dragged her out of the office.”

  “Well,” O’Brien responded somewhat defensively when Russo told him the story, “the same kind of thing happened to me once. Except, instead of claw marks in the wall, she left half a carton of moo shu in the refrigerator.” His whole face brightened as he added, “And that’s still there too!”

  Em Monroe, or “the zaftig Monroe,” as she cheerily admitted to the two agents, was living in NYU housing with her three cats, Curly, Moe, and President Reagan, on Washington Square Park North. She was working as an associate professor in that school’s highly rated Russian studies program. For some reason her cats were attracted to O’Brien, and Monroe had to warn Reagan several times, “Get off the agent.” She explained that she hadn’t seen or spoken to Gradinsky in several years. “Peter was a wonderful teacher,” she told them, “and I learned a very important lesson from him.”

  Russo had the answer. “Don’t fall in love with your teacher?”

  “Exactly.” Em Monroe actually laughed at the thought that she might be harboring him. “Trust me, that would be impossible,” she said.

  O’Brien wasn’t really surprised to hear that. As he knew, intense relationships tended to end badly and permanently. “Why is that?” he asked.

  “Peter was totally allergic to cats.”

  The second name on the list was Karen Abbot, who lived in an apartment in one of those high-rise window boxes on 30th Street and First Avenue and was working as an interpreter at the United Nations. It was early evening by the time they got there. Rather than allowing the doorman to announce them, they flashed their bureau credentials at him. “You got it,” he told them, buzzing them into the building. The court probably wouldn’t like it done that way, but this wasn’t a criminal investigation. At times it was easy to forget that legally Gradinsky wasn’t a wanted man, he was a needed man.

  She lived on the fifth floor. There were two stickers on the door, a peace sign and a notice from a security system that the apartment was protected. Russo knocked on the door. A few seconds later it was answered by Professor Peter Gradinsky. Both O’Brien and Russo were surprised speechless. This was probably the only response for which they were not prepared. Gradinsky frowned and said, “You’re not delivering the Chinese food, are you?”

  “Peter Gradinsky?” Russo said.

  He mumbled some phrase in a foreign language. O’Brien had absolutely no idea what he said, but it sounded profane. Connor introduced himself and “Agent Russo,” but Gradinsky barely responded until he added, “FBI.”

  “FBI?” he repeated quizzically. “What’s going on?”

  A woman shouted from somewhere inside the apartment, “Is that the Chinese food, Peter?”

  He shouted back to her, “No, Karen. It’s the FBI.”

  “Really?” she shouted back, obviously not believing him. “Did they find our Chinese food?”

  To O’Brien and Russo he said, “I’m sorry,” and stood aside for them to enter. To the woman he yelled, “It really is the FBI.”

  “Oh,” she said. The disappointment in her voice was obvious. But she recovered quickly. “Call me when the food comes, okay?”

  Russo noted almost immediately that this was a one-bedroom apartment—and she was actually relieved to see several pillows and a neatly folded blanket on the floor next to a long couch. At least he was sleeping only with his wife and pregnant girlfriend, she thought—admittedly sarcastically.

  O’Brien was somewhat surprised by Gradinsky, who seemed to be a much nicer guy than he had anticipated. The professor had an open, comfortable manner, projecting an aura of approachable competence. There seemed to be little artifice about him. As they sat down, O’Brien asked, “Do you know we’ve been looking for you?”

  Gradinsky seemed genuinely surprised. “The FBI looking for me? You got to be kidding.” And impressed: “My wife must have some pretty important friends I didn’t know about.”

  Russo responded, “This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife, Professor.”

  “Actually we got your name from Tony Cosentino,” O’Brien added.

  “Oh crap,” Gradinsky said. “How mad is he?”

  O’Brien broke the news to him. “His people have been looking for you too.”

  Gradinsky’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “You’re telling me that the FBI and the Mafia are looking for me? Wow.” He chuckled. “I mean, what happened to the Mounties?”

  Russo briefly explained the investigation, artfully emphasizing some f
acts and completely avoiding others to make him believe they knew both more and less than they actually did. Among those things that she failed to mention, O’Brien noticed, was Natalie Speakman’s condition. “So let’s start at the beginning, Professor. Why’d you leave?”

  He smiled wanly. “Can’t we start at the end? The beginning is the difficult part for me to explain.”

  I’ll just bet it is, Russo thought, I’ll just bet. Sitting opposite him, listening to this man who had been the focus of her attention every waking moment for the past two weeks, she couldn’t help feeling somewhat let down. For a man who had created such chaos he seemed perfectly ordinary. It was like meeting a gorgeous movie star at the supermarket checkout counter as she purchased a sixteen-roll pack of toilet paper. “Well, it would be better if you told us what happened.”

  He swallowed hard, then asked plaintively, “You’ve met my wife, right?” Russo confirmed that. Gradinsky hesitated, and as he did, some deep emotion swelled within him. As if he were a marionette and his puppet master had suddenly laid down his strings, his entire body seemed to droop. “This is very hard.” He collected himself. “Grace and I, we have . . . Our marriage is . . .” He took another deep breath. “Wow, this is not easy.” And with that, Peter Gradinsky began revealing the most intimate details of his life and his marriage.

  Sometimes during investigations you learn a lot more than you need to know. Or you want to know. You sit there as impassively as possible listening to people reveal those secrets that have shaped and dominated their lives. The secrets that have caused them to live their lives so differently than they might otherwise have so desired. As an FBI agent your job is to take notes and plug the information into your investigation. You’re not supposed to react, you’re not supposed to show any emotion, be it sympathy or repulsion.

  I’ve been in this position several times, listening to stories that made me want to cry or enraged me. The real difficulty, of course, is that as you listen to these people, you have to try to figure out how much of what they are telling you is absolute unadulterated bullshit.

  O’Brien really did not want to hear Gradinsky’s tale, but he recognized that it was the most direct route to the information he needed: what was going on between Cosentino and the Russians. And so he listened and took notes as Gradinsky slowly and painfully stripped away the façade of his marriage. According to the professor, one ordinary afternoon almost a decade earlier, without the slightest warning, his wife had casually told him that her feelings about him had changed. Actually it wasn’t him, she explained, it was her. She had discovered, and here he quoted her quite specifically, “the other side” of her nature. Soon thereafter she began “what she always referred to as her journey of discovery.”

  Initially he had assumed she was just putting pressure on him to agree to have a child, even adopt one if necessary, but it soon became obvious that she was serious. In response he had begun “dating.” That was the euphemism he used to describe his many affairs, “dating.” Maybe she knew about them, maybe not; their unspoken agreement was that they would publicly maintain the fiction that they were happily married.

  O’Brien kept his head bowed in his notebook. Russo focused on trying to see how long she could look directly at the professor without showing any reaction.

  He wouldn’t have noticed her reaction anyway; his thoughts were focused squarely on his broken marriage. “The ironic thing was that after a few years we discovered that we really did love each other. Not the fireworks kind,” he said dismissively, “I don’t know that we ever had that. I guess I’m not that kind of person. More like the nice-fire-on-a-winter’s-evening kind. We just enjoyed being together. She stopped all that other stuff.” He smiled sadly and admitted, “And I guess she thought I did too.” He looked down at the faded wooden floor and shook his head. “I didn’t want to hurt her. But I couldn’t help myself.” He closed his mouth and waited, as if deciding how far to go. And then he blurted out, “Natalie Speakman? That girl you met. She’s pregnant.” He nodded affirmation. “She wanted me to leave Grace. I mean, how ridiculous is that?”

  Russo did a fine job acting surprised. O’Brien professorily touched the tip of his pen to his tongue, then suggested, “So? What? She was going to tell your wife? That’s why you took off?”

  Before Gradinsky could respond, the buzzer sounded. “That’s the Chinese food,” he explained. “The doorman knows the delivery boy. He just lets him in.” As he went to the front door, he shouted, “Food’s here, Karen.”

  While he was busy paying, there was a brief clamor from behind the closed bedroom door. “Shoot,” a woman said angrily. Then the door opened and an attractive woman rolled into the living room in a wheelchair. Straps around her waist and calves held her firmly in the chair. Her purse was on her lap. “Let me get it this time, Peter,” she said.

  “Too late,” he told her, holding high a large plastic bag.

  Karen Abbot introduced herself to O’Brien and Russo, then asked skeptically, “You guys aren’t really FBI, are you?” After Russo replied that they were indeed FBI agents, Karen looked at Gradinsky and said, sounding slightly disappointed, “Oh, Peter, you haven’t been taking those secret documents home from the office again, have you?”

  O’Brien glanced at Russo, who was absolutely startled.

  “I’m kidding,” Karen Abbot said forcefully when she realized they were taking her seriously. “It’s a joke.” Neither agent seemed convinced. “I swear, I swear on my chair.”

  O’Brien laughed politely. “I knew that. No, the fact is we’re here because the FBI, the Mafia, and several Russian criminals have been looking all over the city for your friend here.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right, nice try, copper. And I’m gonna put a rocket engine on this chair and win the Daytona 500.”

  “He’s serious, Ms. Abbot,” Russo said.

  She looked at Laura Russo, her broad smile slowly disappearing. “Serious seriously?” Russo nodded. Karen collected her thoughts. “You mean Allen Funt really isn’t waiting outside to surprise me?”

  “This is for real,” O’Brien said.

  “Whoa, that’s incredible,” she said. “I swear to God, if I was able to stand up, I’d have to sit down.” She spun her wheels around to face the professor. “So that’s who you’ve been hiding out from? Oh, Peter,” she scolded him, “why didn’t you tell me?” She shook her head in amazement. “Only you could bring the FBI, the Mafia, and the communists together. That’s so . . .” She searched for the proper word. “So . . . New York.” She gracefully turned her chair to O’Brien. “The guy knocks on my door one night a couple of weeks ago looking all sad and tells me he needs a place to stay for a few days. We’ve been friends for a long time, so why not? Next thing I know he’s got me doing wheelies on the promenade.” She tsked, “Peter, Peter, Peter.”

  In response he reached into the bag and said brightly, “Egg rolls anyone? Let’s eat before it gets cold.” O’Brien started to object, but Gradinsky reminded him of the Rule of Dim Sum: Chinese food expands to meet all the people present.

  Following his usual technique, O’Brien excused himself to wash his hands. This gave him the opportunity to get a quick look at the apartment. Observe it all, details later. The bedroom was handicap-equipped, with a railed hospital bed next to the window. A rudimentary pulley system hung from the ceiling, allowing Karen Abbot to support herself getting in and out of bed. The bathroom also had a range of devices to help her get around, but what especially drew his attention was a nicely framed unsigned pen-and-ink drawing hanging on the wall. It showed what was clearly a caricature of Karen in her wheelchair skiing down a hill. Behind her the chair had left two parallel tracks in the snow. At one point a tree had blocked her path—and the tracks had bulged outward and gone on either side of a large tree trunk. Below the sketch the artist had written, “Miracles happen.”

  The four of them sat in Karen’s “dining alcove,” a round table pushed into a corner. Gradinsky was
particularly solicitous of Abbot, getting her an extra seat cushion to raise her to a comfortable height and even positioning her legs under the table, then serving her, from the hot-and-sour soup to the last pineapples.

  It quickly became obvious that the professor did not want to discuss his complicated marital situation in front of Karen. But to the surprise of both agents, who were used to squeezing bits of details out of reluctant witnesses, he willingly poured out the whole story of his dealings with Cosentino. More than that, he clearly enjoyed talking about it, often looking directly at Karen as he did.

  It was O’Brien who’d initially brought up the subject, asking casually while dishing out the fried rice how well Gradinsky knew Tony Cosentino. The professor didn’t even hesitate to consider the consequences before answering. “I know him a little. It was a business relationship, that’s all it ever was. What do you want to know about it?”

  Russo’s heart danced as she listened to him. It was as if she had discovered the Lost Dutchman mine. This was the mother lode. O’Brien wrote as fast as he could. Obviously Professor Gradinsky found it considerably easier to talk about the work he did for stone-cold killers than discuss the many ways he’d disappointed his wife.

  As he explained, the “big megillah” had begun the night he and Grace were taken by friends of theirs to an Italian restaurant in Queens, a place named Gino’s, to celebrate their anniversary. “We ordered a nice bottle of wine and I made an old toast in Russian to love and friendship. You know, the joy of the harvest, my mother’s bosom . . .”

  “The dignity of the ox,” Karen added.

  “Right. The, uh, courage of the Cossacks. You know those crazy Russian poets. So when I finished, this really big guy”—he shared what was clearly an inside joke with Karen—“big as a Catskill, comes along. Naturally his nickname was Skinny, Skinny Al D’Angelo.” In a deep voice, apparently his imitation of D’Angelo, he said, “I heard youse talking commie. What is it you do?”