Fuck that no-good motherfucking fucker. I ain’t kidding this time. I swear to God, I see that fucking guy come around here again, I’m gonna fucking rip out his heart and stuff it down his throat till he’s shitting it out. I’m fucking pissed off.”
“Listen to me, kid. You can’t hold back like that. You got something to say, you gotta say it right out loud. Holding your feelings inside like that, it ain’t good for you.”
“Who the hell is that?” asked FBI Special Agent Connor O’Brien, nodding toward the state-of-the-art TEK speakers. Every word spoken in the club was being recorded.
“Which one,” wondered his new partner, Laura Russo, “Abbott or Costello?”
“The first one, the linguistics genius.”
She checked her notes. “That is one Mr. Edward Peter LaRocca, a.k.a. Little Eddie, Eddie Black, Crazy Eddie.” She looked up at O’Brien. “The original Crazy Eddie.”
“What’s he got, a cold?” O’Brien asked as he walked into the tiny kitchen. “That doesn’t sound like him. Hey, you want something to drink?”
Russo stood up and stretched. From habit more than necessity her eyes stayed riveted on the front of the social club. “They leave any of my mineral water in there?”
“They” being Team II of the agents working the stakeout of the Freemont Avenue Social Club. Twenty-four-hour surveillance operations like this one required two or sometimes three teams rotating around the clock. As many as six people shared the one-bedroom apartment, which made it hard for anyone to keep their own food or drinks in the refrigerator. Maybe the question asked most often in the apartment was, “Who left the butter out?”
Believe me, there are very few assignments you can get in the FBI as boring as sitting on a wire. In this particular case, using information provided by an undercover agent who had successfully infiltrated the crew run by Henry Franzone—apparently stolen goods were being sold inside the social club—the bureau had obtained a warrant to bug the place. Among the stolen items the undercover agent had “personally witnessed being sold” were Banlon shirts. As much as anything else, though, this was an intelligence-gathering operation—although a lot of agents who have worked organized crime would tell you that what they heard could not properly be called intelligence.
Usually these assignments consisted of long hours spent listening to bullshit conversations, hoping to find a single nugget of useful information buried in a mine of boredom. Early in my career as an FBI agent, long before I went undercover inside the Mafia as a small-time jewel thief named Donnie Brasco, I spent what seemed like an eternity listening to old wiretaps, reading reports, and watching surveillance tapes to try to get to know how these people thought and spoke and moved. Combined with the education I received growing up on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, this was the beginning of my education into the world of organized crime. I understand that some people might think it’s exciting to be eavesdropping on real live gangsters who don’t know they’re being tapped or taped. It isn’t. It wears real thin real quick.
Being an FBI agent is not the thrill-a-minute job portrayed by TV and movie producers. It’s an always interesting, occasionally exciting job in a mammoth bureaucracy. The fact is that most agents spend most of their time collecting information. Everything from conducting interviews for government security clearances to picking up and analyzing bomb fragments in Africa. It’s a career of watching and listening and tailing and interviewing, endlessly interviewing, gathering a mountain of information and trying to transform it into a molehill of evidence.
Being on-site in an observation or listening post is among the most tedious of all assignments. It consists of little more than endless hours spent watching and waiting for something to happen. Sometimes the most exciting thing that happens during an eight-hour shift is a pizza delivery. In organized crime investigations much of the time the people you’re watching know they’re being watched. They may not know exactly where you are, but they know they’re being watched. And we know they know we’re watching. In the old days agents used to be assigned to specific individuals for years at a time and the agent and the subject would actually get to know each other. On occasion they would even speak to each other. Everybody knew the rules and respected them.
The listening posts, observation posts, whatever you want to call them, are not what you would describe as immaculate. Probably “unbelievably filthy” would be more accurate. The way it used to be was that you had a small area with four to six men living there around the clock. Nobody was responsible for keeping it clean, so that’s who took care of it. Early in my career I was working the Hijack Truck Squad and we were watching warehouses in New Jersey and Brooklyn. I guess I was a little more concerned about cleanliness than the other agents: I would take the garbage out once a month whether it needed to be taken out or not. One time, I remember, my partner pointed at a plate of melted butter on the table and said with disgust, “That butter’s been sitting out since April.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What year?” That’s how bad it used to get sometimes.
Things did get a little better when they started adding female agents to the teams. Some of these women were tough—they insisted that their partners pick up after themselves. This particular apartment was known as the Country Club. That was a joke. This apartment was as much like a country club as Sinatra was a heavy-metal singer.
It was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. The building had to be at least eighty years old. New wiring had been installed to support the high-tech equipment the agents needed, but there had been no reason to upgrade the plumbing or the heating. The good news was that the plumbing and the heating banged and rattled and hissed only when they worked, which at best was erratically.
The Country Club exuded all the charm and style that the General Accounting Office could provide. It had one couch, an uneasy chair, and a kitchen set—a table with four wooden chairs that had been confiscated in a drug raid. A television and a transistor radio that had been provided by an agent assigned there for more than a year were known as the entertainment center. The tiny kitchen contained a refrigerator that dated from Eisenhower and a well-used microwave. Even the bravest of the agents wouldn’t dare look at whatever life was going on behind the refrigerator.
But for Agents O’Brien and Russo this was home and office, eight to twelve hours a day, five and on occasion six days a week. On this particular afternoon they were a little more attentive than usual because two days earlier the body of a made member of the Genovese crime family had been found in the trunk of a stolen Ford coupe under the Williamsburg Bridge. What was unusual was that before he was killed, he’d been burned with cigarettes on his face, inside both ears, and on his prick and balls. Additionally both arms and one leg had been crushed almost flat by some extremely heavy object. This guy had been tortured, which was not the way the mob usually conducted business. The best guess was that the somebody who did him wanted to get some information from him pretty badly. The questions of the day were, who was that somebody and what type of information were they looking for? Was it family business? This seemed more like the way the ethnic groups, people like the Westies, a group of Irish crazies who controlled Hell’s Kitchen, or the Colombians or even the newcomers, the Russians, who were trying to build a nasty reputation, did things.
There was a pretty good chance that this killing would be the primary topic of conversation in every social club in New York. Just like when there’s a big fire, that’s all firemen talk about in the firehouses; when there’s a mob killing, that’s what they talk about in the social clubs. So Little Eddie got Russo’s attention when he started whining about the latest job—finding an unknown individual without being provided sufficient background information. “Just listen to him,” she said, shaking her head with wonder. “I never heard anybody complain so much.”
“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” O’Brien said loudly from the kitchen. “That’s what they’re experts at, complaining. When they don’t have anything to complain about, they complain about not having anything to complain about.” He popped open a bottle of mineral water and asked, “You want some ice with your water?”
“No thanks.”
O’Brien noticed that when Russo shook her head, her tied-back light brown ponytail rolled sensually from side to side. They’d been working together in the Country Club for almost five weeks. The first few weeks were strictly professional, but the last couple of weeks he’d found himself stealing the occasional glance at her. He wasn’t afraid to admit to himself that he found her attractive, sort of Lesley Ann Warren with the confidence of Katharine Hepburn, but he would never admit this to anyone else, and there was exactly no chance that he would ever act on that attraction. He’d heard too many stories about careers going down the chute for getting sexually involved with a female agent. This was right about the time that sexual harassment was becoming a serious occupational hazard. They had even started giving a warning lecture about it at the academy. He didn’t need the reminder. Connor O’Brien prided himself on being much too smart to fall into that particular trap. Returning to the window with Russo’s mineral water, he asked, “Who’s he talking about?”
“Some Russian. A Professor G. You got anything about him?”
“A Russian, huh? That’s pretty interesting.” He began leafing through his notebook. Success or failure in just about any endeavor, he’d learned from his father, a very successful investment banker, was a matter of hard work and organization. It wasn’t enough just gathering information, you had to be able to access it. You had to be able to find it when you needed it. So in addition to all the official forms he filled out for the bureau, he carried a small notebook and kept his own loose-leaf binder, cross-indexed by given name and nickname, by dates, by known or suspected involvement with groups of specific crimes. If he had previously come across any Professor G, he would be able to find out when, how, and who. He scrolled rapidly through the Gs with his index finger. While he found a “Doctor G,” there was no “Professor G.” “No. Nothing.”
“How about anything in that book about the Russian mob guys?”
He glanced through the Rs, then shook his head. “You want to call it in?” When agents working a stakeout overheard anything timely, particularly interesting, or very unusual on a wire, standard procedure required them to immediately notify a supervisor. That way, for example, if someone was about to get whacked, they could do something to stop it. But nobody liked to report anything short of that because the inevitable result was that a whole lot of reports would have to be written. CYA, cover your ass, was the foundation of just about every successful bureau career. This was one of those close calls. A man was missing and a body got found. Maybe pieces of the same puzzle. It was probably nothing, but there existed that slight, tantalizing possibility that it was something.
The bureau had been struggling for more than three years to find a link between the five New York families and the growing Russian mob. It was well known that they’d had an occasional date, but no one had been able to prove that they had gotten married. So the combination of a missing Russian and an Italian body was at least interesting. “Let’s just see where it goes,” O’Brien decided.
Russo got up and stretched, clasping her hands behind her neck and thrusting out her elbows. Russo wasn’t naïve: She knew she was an attractive woman and, more important, she knew how to use it for her own benefit. Within the regulations, of course, always within the regs. This was the first time Russo had worked with O’Brien, but the two of them had slid easily into a comfortable team. Both of them knew the rules and had learned how to get the job done without actually breaking them.
Organized crime was a new assignment for Russo, who had spent most of her seven-year career working undercover, first in HMO fraud investigations, then in counterintelligence. She’d requested an organized crime assignment primarily because it was an area in which few female agents had ever worked. It wasn’t so much bureau policy as logic. The mob was so strictly a man’s world that there wasn’t much room in it for women. Russo was smart, though, and ambitious, so she figured out that punching the organized crime ticket would set her apart from most other female agents. As an additional bonus organized crime assignments generally meant staying put in the same city for a substantial period of time. So eight weeks earlier she’d arrived in New York City for the first time since her St. Louis high school senior class trip. This time she intended to stay for more than five days.
O’Brien and Russo made a good team. Just as in every other business, there were two types of agents in the FBI: those people who did the grunt work and made cases and those people who went along to get along. The workers tended to get the glory, but they also got the blame when things got screwed up. The bureau was not known to stick out its reputation to protect agents. The agents who put in their time, stayed out of trouble, and did their paperwork got their scheduled promotions. Both O’Brien and Russo were workers.
As O’Brien settled into the uneasy chair, a ripped leather recliner some previous resident of the Country Club had rescued from the sidewalk, he heard people inside the Freemont greeting Bobby San Filippo. “Hey, Russo,” he shouted to Laura, who had gone into the kitchen, “your boyfriend’s back.”
Bobby Blue Eyes had become a continuing joke between them. The first time Russo had looked at surveillance photographs of San Filippo, with his perfectly styled hair, tailored clothes, Calvin Klein sunglasses, and large diamond pinkie ring, she’d said facetiously, “Hold me back, boys, my Prince Charming has just arrived.”
In the background they heard the radio suddenly get louder, and a voice they could barely hear and was therefore impossible to identify asked, “. . . obby, who’s this . . . ed to find?”
O’Brien sighed. “That bastard. He turned the radio up again. I hate that sappy music. Couldn’t they at least play some rock music once in a while? If I hear that fucking Sinatra one more—”
“Hey!” Russo snapped. “Watch it there, buddy. I’m warning you right now, don’t screw with Frank. I wouldn’t want to have to take you down.” Like every Italian off the Hill in St. Louis, she’d grown up listening to Sinatra coming out of every open window on the block. Except in her own room late at night, when she’d put her ear against the radio and listen to the Beatles. In fact, although she would never dare admit it to a living Italian soul, if she personally never had to listen to him singing “It Was a Very Good Year” ever again, she would light a candle to the Madonna. Maybe she’d even pop into a church one Sunday morning. But none of that mattered when O’Brien attacked the Chairman. It was her responsibility to her entire family, to all the Italians in the world, to defend Frank from the Irish O’Brien’s heathen remarks.
There was almost always a radio or television playing loudly inside the social clubs, more to prevent conversations being overheard than for entertainment. Years earlier it had been very difficult to plant a bug inside a social club, but as the bureau’s ELSUR—electronic surveillance—capabilities improved with the development of smaller and more sophisticated listening devices, and the engineers in the Technical Section of the crime lab got more creative, bugs had become as plentiful as . . . as bugs. Most mobsters just assumed that the clubs and their cars were bugged, and when they needed to have a serious conversation, they either took a walk outside or turned up the volume on the TV or radio to cover their voices.
When I was working undercover as Donnie Brasco, I never liked wearing a wire. Most of the time I just wouldn’t do it. I hated the fucking things. One time another undercover I know, who was wearing a wire, was hanging out in an apartment with several members of his crew. These guys were stone-cold killers. Somehow there was a bug in the agent’s bug, and suddenly every word spoken in the apartment was being broadcast through the television set. These guys went crazy trying to figure out what was going on. And not one of them ever suspected the most obvious reason—there was a microphone in the room!
I’ve seen mikes and even cameras planted in an incredible variety of places. The bureau has put them inside car dashboards, inside lightbulbs, in a sprinkler system. One time for a sting operation they hung a painting of a gorgeous nude woman on the wall—and installed the camera in the center of one of her nipples. There wasn’t ever a guy who walked into that room and didn’t look directly at her breasts, allowing the FBI surveillance team to get a clear picture of every single person.
The bug inside the Freemont Avenue Social Club had been installed in the very last place anybody would suspect: inside the radio. It had required the work of an engineering genius to figure out how to blunt the sound from the radio speaker. The actual scientific principle was explained to me once, but I didn’t completely understand it. It had something to do with mirroring sounds, causing the sound waves to be canceled, supposedly allowing quality audiotapes to be made.
Russo leaned against the wall, sipping her mineral water. “So? What do you think about this Russian? Want to make a guess why they’re looking for him?”
He shook his head. “You got me. I mean, c’mon, who knows why these guys do anything? The only thing you can know for sure is that whatever it’s about, it’s got something to do with money. Guaranteed. Chances are this guy owes somebody and doesn’t want to pay it back or doesn’t have it. Maybe he’s a gambler, maybe he borrowed. But if the mob is looking for him, it’s about money.”
One of the first lessons young agents learn is to never suppose. In this kind of work people often surprise you. Profession isn’t personality. I’ve seen kindergarten teachers who were degenerate gamblers, cancer researchers addicted to hard drugs, cops who sold intelligence to organized crime. O’Brien was smart enough to temper curiosity with caution. At least most of the time.
Russo smiled shyly. “Wanna find out?”
Connor O’Brien chuckled. The only time she let herself be a woman, he thought, was when she wanted help from a man. And he appreciated that. “You’re some piece of work,” he said.
“C’mon, O’Brien, it’s right there in front of us. What can happen? Then at least we’d have some idea of exactly what’s going down.”
He hesitated, then said, “You know what the three worst words in the English language are?”
“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 question: “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 coughing 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.”
Simon let that sink in. “So then if he’s here, he’s not missing. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”
O’Brien agreed. “Right.” Then he looked at Russo. “Right?”
Russo agreed.
“Then it’s not Goodenov,” Geri said. “I saw him leaving maybe an hour ago.” She picked up a clipboard and began examining the sign-in sheet. “Oak-kay,” she said, drawing in the word and then exhaling it in a great puff of cigarette smoke. “Let’s see who we don’t have here.” She started humming a Russian dance tune as she skimmed down the roster. “No. No. Saw him. No. No. He’s dead. No. No . . .”
“Who’s dead?” Russo wondered.
“Professor Golotin. Harry Golotin, Russian lit. It can’t be him, he died more than a year ago. He had a sudden heart attack”—once again she lowered her voice to a near whisper—“while . . . you know, doing it with one of his students. So that’s the reason we haven’t seen him lately.” Then, once again at full blast, she continued, “They’re just using up the old forms.” She continued scrolling down the list, shaking her head as she passed each name. “I don’t know, they all seem so . . .” And suddenly she stopped. “Oh, wait. Here.” She hacked her throat clear one more time. “This could be your man.”
“What do you got?” Russo asked, leaning over the desk.
“Professor Gradinsky. Peter. He teaches Slavic Linguistics and Contrastive Phonics.”
“Oh,” O’Brien said.
“But I just can’t imagine Mr. Gradinsky . . . I mean . . . he’s always so . . .” She searched the air for the right word and found it. “. . . Dependable.”
“What’s up with him?” O’Brien asked.
Geri Simon expertly knocked a long ash from the end of her cigarette right into the sombrero’s brim, and still without looking at either agent exhaled a long thin line of smoke that would have made Bacall proud. Russo realized immediately that Simon had feelings for this Gradinsky a lot deeper than she would ever admit. “I know he missed a very important appointment two days ago and then, I mean, he hasn’t shown up for his classes. That’s just not like him. He’s very . . .” She hesitated.
O’Brien finished the sentence for her: “Dependable.”
“Exactly. Thank you.” Clearly Gradinsky was very dependable. Completely ignoring O’Brien, Simon looked directly to Russo and asked with obvious concern, “Do you think something’s happened to him?”
O’Brien also noticed more than an administrative assistant’s apprehension in that question, and he responded with the correct answer. “I doubt it very much. Sometimes the strangest things have the simplest answers. We just need to check it out. You have his home address?”
He handed her his pocket notebook opened to a blank page, and Simon wrote down the professor’s address and telephone number on it. “I won’t really worry about him too much. I mean, if he really was missing, Grace—his wife—she would have called here.”
“Maybe we could take a quick look at his office?” O’Brien suggested. “You know, that might tell us something. Maybe he’s got a calendar in there or something.”
Simon shook her head. “I can’t let you do that without his permission. Besides, he always locks up and I don’t have the key.”
Russo asked, “Is there a picture of him around anywhere? Maybe a yearbook or something?”
Geri Simon stood up and walked four steps across the room to a steel bookcase and pulled out a thick volume. “He’s in here somewhere.” She leafed rapidly through the pages until she found the annual photograph of the Slavic Studies Department. “This is him,” she said, pointing to a small, somewhat burly man with a stern look on his round, puffy face. His hair was thinning and he had a trim mustache.
One other thing O’Brien noticed about this photograph. In it Peter Gradinsky was standing right next to Geri Simon. His left hand was hidden behind her back—and she was smiling innocently.