The Good Guys Page 4

  “Absolutely,” she said firmly, and then guessed, “Are you awake?”

  “Nice try, but no. The three worst words in the English language are ‘What could happen?’ Because if it can happen, sometimes it does.”

  “Oh, please. That’s just ridiculous. We’re not doing anything . . .”

  Connor listened, but he was pretty certain he would go along with her plan. Whatever it was. In the few weeks they’d worked together he’d been impressed by her abilities. Laura Russo was an aggressive, shoot-from-her-very-attractive-hips agent. She knew her stuff.

  I knew the argument because I knew the temptation. This was the other side of going along to get along—go ahead to get ahead. Good young agents were rarely satisfied with passive assignments. They wanted to get into the action. Early in my career I’d felt the same pull. Take a chance and if you’re right, they know your name in Washington. You’re on your way. There were real benefits available to aggressive agents who got the job done. Stars shined. But there were also penalties for failure, penalties that involved transfers to small offices in cold places.

  “Tell you what,” O’Brien decided, “you really want to do this, I’ll call Slattery. As long as we’re just doing a simple background check, I don’t think he’ll have a problem with it. But that way, whatever happens we’re covered.”

  Russo straightened up, once again the asexual FBI agent. In that instant it actually looked to O’Brien that her hair had gotten shorter. “Good,” she said, “real good.”

  In the background every word spoken in the social club was being recorded. “. . . heard I was going to college, she’d have a cow.”

  “Eddie, I think she already did.”

  The official transcription of that dialogue would be followed by the description: (Laughter). But Russo didn’t think it was the slightest bit funny. She didn’t think any of them were particularly clever or even slightly amusing. Unlike some agents who became fascinated by mob culture and read all the books and saw all the movies, she knew exactly who they were. She wasn’t fooled by the image created by the media; Laura Russo had known them just about her entire life. She could remember them sitting at the big round table for ten in the rear of her Uncle Joe’s restaurant, night after night, boorishly taking over the place. She remembered them making a big fuss over her when she waited on them, making jokes she didn’t quite understand. In fact, when she really thought about it, she could almost taste the foul smell of their cigars that filled the place. As far as she knew, her Uncle Joe never had any problems with them. They had paid in cash and were reasonably friendly with the other customers. But from the moment they walked in until they left late at night, the restaurant had an unpleasant feel to it. They sucked in all the warmth.

  O’Brien and Russo went to see James Slattery the following morning. Jim Slattery was running the surveillance operation. Slattery was the best type of supervisor, an agent nearing the end of a solid if not spectacular career. After twenty-six years in the bureau he’d made enough friends and lost enough ambition to not be overly concerned about every decision he made. He had a reputation for giving his people a lot of rope, but holding tightly to the other end in case they slipped.

  I knew Slattery. I’d met him about ten years earlier, when I first started working organized crime in New York. He was a big guy even then, six-four, six-five, maybe two sixty, toward the limits of the regulations. He was still big—he had to be touching two eighty—but what once was muscle had settled into a potbelly. Slattery was a son of the auld sod, the man had the Irish about him. He could tell a fine joke, finish a serious bottle, and charm the ladies. But the one thing he didn’t have that mattered in the bureau was the luck. All his Irish luck must have come from Northern Ireland. He just never lucked into the assignment that could have made the difference in his career. I had never even considered working undercover, for example, but one little thing led to the next and the next and there I was inside the Mafia. Obviously that assignment made my career. But Slattery had realized, maybe ten years in, that he wasn’t going to be so fortunate. He accepted it and allowed his passion for the bureau to drain slowly away. The good news was that he no longer regretted going home at five o’clock on Friday without a briefcase stuffed with paperwork.

  His office was in the Federal Building on lower Broadway. It was small and neat, with a view of the office building directly across the street. But if you stood to the very side of Slattery’s window and looked uptown, you could see a slice of the upper stories of the Empire State Building. His office was actually quite symbolic. It was right next to the larger corner office that commanded sweeping views uptown. Which was pretty much as close as Slattery ever got to real power in the bureau.

  O’Brien and Russo sat across Slattery’s government-issued wooden desk. O’Brien noted that he had placed photographs of his attractive wife and two teenage sons on a glass-topped table behind his desk so they would face anyone sitting opposite him. He also noted, from Slattery’s appearance in those photographs, that they had been taken years earlier, when he had a full head of dark hair.

  Russo earnestly laid out the situation for him: Information developed through a legally placed bug had revealed that the Mafia wanted to find a Columbia University Russian professor for reasons unknown. The teacher’s full name was also unknown.

  “Yeah? And?” Slattery wondered.

  “Well, sir,” O’Brien began carefully, “it’s our feeling that if we—”

  “We want to find this guy first,” Russo interrupted. “Obviously he has some connection to the family and they can’t find him. If he’s running from them, he might just be willing . . .”

  Slattery covered his mouth with his cupped palm. While that made it appear as if he were contemplating a decision, in fact he was trying to stifle a smile. He had been a vocal supporter of the bureau’s begrudging efforts to eliminate gender-based policies, although he also knew that actually accomplishing that was pretty much impossible. Hoover’s bureau had institutionalized machismo—the vending machines practically dispensed testosterone—and changing that climate was about as simple as melting glaciers with a hair dryer. It would take a long, long time.

  But because Slattery still loved the bureau, even after all these years, he knew that doing so was not only fair, it was good business. He’d worked with several female agents during his career and almost unfailingly had found them to be as competent as men—and usually a lot more aggressive. Sitting there looking at O’Brien and Russo, he couldn’t help thinking that years ago this would have been the basis of a great Tracy-Hepburn movie, the perky female agent pushing the somewhat reluctant male agent into the middle of an international mess.

  Russo had finished talking and was looking at him expectantly. He took a deep breath and grimaced, then spun halfway around in his chair, actions that demonstrated clearly how seriously he was considering this request, although truthfully he hadn’t really been paying attention and didn’t know precisely what it was she wanted him to do. “All right,” he said finally, covering himself, “suppose I let you go ahead. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  Russo started to respond, but this time O’Brien interrupted, placing a cautionary hand on top of hers. “Nothing much. We just want to go up to Columbia and ID this professor. Then we’ll run a background check on him. Maybe that’ll give us some idea why the mob is looking for him.”

  “That’s it?” Slattery asked.

  “That’s it,” O’Brien replied.

  Like everybody else working organized crime, Slattery had a body on his mind. “You think it might have something to do with what they found under the bridge?”

  O’Brien grabbed his hook. “There’s one way of finding out.”

  Russo added, pretty much unnecessarily, “You got to admit it’s pretty strange that these people would be so interested in a Russian professor. I’m . . . we’re curious, that’s all.”

  Slattery asked what is arguably the bureau’s most important questio
n: “How long’s it going to take you?” In the end, whatever the result of an investigation, time spent had to be accounted for and all the proper paperwork had to be filled out. The bureau lived on an annual budget voted by Congress, and that money bought time.

  “Not more than a day,” O’Brien said definitively, and then added with perfect timing, “Two at the most.”

  “Okay, tell you what,” Slattery decided, “just make sure I get some kind of reasonable memo. But one day, that’s it. One. You guys need another team to cover for you?”

  Russo told him they had already made arrangements with the night team to switch schedules. That would give them most of the day.

  “Just let me know what’s going on,” Slattery reminded them as he walked them to the door. “I’m too old for surprises.”

  Many of the bureau’s most productive investigations have started with just such minor meetings.

  When O’Brien came out of his brownstone on West 87th Street at eight-thirty the following morning, Russo was sitting on cement steps waiting for him. “Here,” she said, handing him a cup of food cart coffee, “milk, no sugar.”

  “Why didn’t you ring the buzzer?” he asked as they walked toward his parking garage. Sometimes he just couldn’t understand what was going on in her mind. Waiting for someone in front of their building for who knows how long—without letting them know you’re there? That made no sense to him.

  “No big thing,” she said. She’d never admit it to him, but she hadn’t hit his buzzer because she didn’t know who might be up there with him. And really did not want to know. Laura Russo had done an excellent job maintaining a strictly professional relationship with Connor O’Brien. She knew very little about his personal life: She knew he was single, that he had never been married, and from his often funny complaints about his social life it was pretty obvious he wasn’t involved with anyone. And that he had a loving but somewhat combative relationship with an overbearing mother he referred to mostly as “the lion in Gucci.” Conversely Russo made certain he knew only the bare facts about her life: that she was divorced from an FBI agent currently assigned to the Los Angeles office and that she lived by herself in a comfortable one-bedroom apartment in a renovated building on Spring Street in suddenly fashionable SoHo.

  That was the ANK, as she would describe it: all necessary knowledge. And as far as she was concerned, that was exactly the way she wanted to keep it. Laura Russo took great pride in never making the same mistake twice.

  Every FBI team is assigned a vehicle, usually a Ford or a Chevy, but O’Brien preferred to use his own car, a scratched and banged-up five-year-old Mercury Cougar XR-7 that he’d named Xavier, in which he had installed both bureau and NYPD radios, a siren and dashboard beacon. “I’ve put every single dent in this car myself,” he told Russo with a New Yorker’s obvious pride.

  Looking at the car, she offered him congratulations on a job well done.

  O’Brien drove Xavier Cougar up to the Columbia University campus on Morningside Heights and parked at a meter on 114th Street. He put four quarters in the meter for the hour, then added one more but did not turn the handle. By city statute, before writing a parking ticket meter maids were required to confirm that the meter was operative. So if there was a quarter sitting in the slot, turning the handle activated the meter, buying a ticket-saving fifteen minutes. In most other areas of the city O’Brien probably wouldn’t have bothered with the meter; he just would have left his NYPD-issued parking permit on the dashboard. But this was Columbia University. It wasn’t that many years ago that anti-Vietnam War students had taken control of the campus, and Columbia’s students still didn’t exhibit a lot of peace and love for law enforcement of any kind. Several months earlier it had cost O’Brien forty-five dollars, the price of a new tire, to learn that lesson when he had to interview an NYU administrator about some security clearance problem.

  The Slavic Studies Department was located in Hamilton Hall, off Amsterdam Avenue. Hamilton Hall was one of the university’s original buildings and had been designed by Stanford White’s firm. As O’Brien and Russo briskly walked up the stone steps on the way to another interview, past the statue of Alexander Hamilton, Connor wondered exactly how many interviews he’d conducted in his eleven years as an agent. He couldn’t settle on a figure. Hundreds, he decided, maybe close to a thousand.

  Information was the name of the game and he was good at getting it. Through the years he’d learned how to squeeze out as much of the important stuff as was possible. Being a good interviewer meant being a good actor, becoming the person the individual you’re questioning is comfortable talking to. For example, if the subject was respectful of the bureau—and Connor could pretty much determine this by the expression on their face when he flashed his credentials—he played up his professionalism, intentionally throwing in a lot of the silly terms used by television cops. Like “perp.” When it was beneficial, he perped away. One time, for example, a cop he knew had arrested a Peeping Tom who liked to defecate while watching through windows; O’Brien always referred to that as “the case of the peeping pooper perp.”

  When Connor had to question people who didn’t like the bureau, he played up his regular-guy-just-doing-his-job. At other times he became a New York City street guy. And, when necessary he became the Ivy League college graduate. Whatever he had to be, he became. Truthfully he wasn’t even above a pinch of flirtation when questioning a single woman. Interviewing was an art in which he fancied himself an artist.

  The Slavic Studies Department was on the seventh floor. O’Brien and Russo shared the elevator with several coeds. As they rode up, Connor fixed his eyes on the lighted floor directory above the doors and never glanced away, so he didn’t catch Russo stealing occasional glances to see if he was checking out the college girls.

  As they approached the Slavic administration office, they heard a booming voice warning, “Get your higgin’ frands off my potato chips.” That voice, they discovered seconds later, belonged to Geraldine Simon, Executive Administrative Assistant, Department of Slavic Studies, who apparently had caught a student reaching into her bag of potato chips. “What do you think you’re doing?” she complained to the student. “That’s my breakfast.” O’Brien guessed that she was sixty-three but probably admitted to fifty-four. She had a stack of bright red hair piled high on her head, an unusual color for a woman of that age, and matching lipstick. Her perfectly polished nails were a couple of shades darker. She turned to the agents and extinguished her cigarette in a ceramic sombrero ashtray. “Hi,” she said, coughing once to clear her throat. “What can I do you for?”

  O’Brien smiled casually. He was real good with older women, having had considerable practice with his mother and her friends. He smoothly took his notebook out of his back pocket and said, “I was just—”

  “I’m Special Agent Russo,” Laura said crisply. “This is Special Agent O’Brien. We’re FBI and we need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  O’Brien’s smile disappeared. So much for his roguish-young-man strategy.

  “Can I see your badges?” Geri Simon responded.

  Almost simultaneously O’Brien and Russo opened their wallets and showed her their bureau identification.

  Simon shook her head. “No, not the cards.” She laughed easily. “I mean, I know you gotta be what you say you are, because around here there’s no advantage pretending to be an FBI agent. But I’ve never seen real FBI badges, except the one they show at the opening of that TV show.”

  Russo showed Simon her badge.

  “My former brother-in-law once had a friend in the FBI,” Simon said agreeably, “but that was a long time ago.” She snapped the bottom of her cigarette pack with her forefinger and a single cigarette popped up. She offered it to both O’Brien and Russo, and after they’d refused she put the filter in her mouth and slipped the cigarette out of the pack. O’Brien picked up the red plastic lighter from her desk and lit it. “Thanks,” she said, taking a deep breath, then c
oughing her throat clear once again. “You can call me Geri. So? What are you doing here?”

  This was taking place in the midst of the cold war, when the Russians were still considered our enemy. O’Brien had expected to meet some sort of resistance, some claim to privacy, some attempt to maintain secrecy. Some form of protest. About the only thing he hadn’t anticipated was complete cooperation. It had been his experience that people who had the least to hide often made the greatest effort to hide it.

  Russo explained to Geri Simon that they were trying to locate a Russian professor known only as Professor G. “That’s the only name we know, Professor G.”

  “That’s Goodenov,” she said.

  O’Brien was a little confused. “What is?”

  “It’s Goodenov,” she repeated.

  “I know, I heard you,” he said. “What’s good enough?”

  Simon looked at him with disgust. This was the best the FBI could do? Pronouncing each word distinctly, she said, “The professor that you want to know about. That’s probably Goodenov, Mikhail Goodenov. That’s what some of the students call him, Professor G. Or even Professor Gee-Whiz.”

  Russo bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud. Generally it’s considered poor form for an agent to laugh at her partner. O’Brien got the joke but was too embarrassed to laugh. That was the kind of ridiculous mistake other people made, not him. “I’m really sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, you said—”

  “I get it,” Simon said somewhat testily. “You know, you’re not the first person to make that mistake.”

  O’Brien ignored her. “Let me ask you this, then: Is he the only one? Are there any other professors whose first or last name begins with a G?”

  “O’Brien,” she said, leaning forward on her desk and lowering her voice as if she were confiding in him, “this is the Slavic Studies Department. Half the professors in here have names beginning with a G.”

  Russo picked that moment to intercede. “Listen, Geri,” she said, “here’s what’s going on. The man we’re looking for probably hasn’t been around in a few days. That’s why we’re here. A man we only know as Professor G is missing and we need to find out who he is. Then maybe we can find out where he is.”