An assault on an agent, whether successful or not, automatically triggers the highest-priority investigation. Before dawn agents from the New York office were swarming over Russo’s building like ants on sugar, or better, like the mob on money. In addition, several forensic experts from the crime lab in Washington caught the 7 a.m. shuttle and by noon were scouring the building for any type of evidence. The crime lab people in particular are magicians at plucking dust from the air and somehow using it to link a specific individual to a specific event.
But even Theo Kojak couldn’t have done much with Russo’s place. Any fingerprints or palm prints that might have been left on the doorknob were smudged beyond recognition. There were too many years of prints on her door and the hallway walls to be useful. The downstairs foyer door had been opened with the same jeweler’s pick that the intruder had used to try to jimmy the apartment door. It left a few scratches on the lock, and if the pick was ever found, the lab’s Toolmarks Unit might be able to match it. The operative word being “might.” But even that was a real long shot. A partial shoe print had been found in a small puddle of hardening pea soup that someone had dropped on one of the treads, but it had been made by a popular soft-soled shoe that could have belonged to just about anybody. A gum wrapper was found in a corner, but later that day agents confirmed it had been tossed there by Russo’s neighbor, Ginger Sanchez. Russo thought it was pretty amusing that six different agents found it necessary to interview Ms. Sanchez about her gum wrapper toss. Laura speculated it was the most thoroughly investigated littering case in bureau history. And early in the afternoon, after the NYPD had been notified, two patrolmen and a sergeant also spent the necessary time with Ginger to completely corroborate her wrapper story. Collectively they spent more time with Ms. Sanchez than with Russo. And they found it more difficult to believe that Ginger was a second-grade teacher than that Russo was an FBI agent.
Russo did her best to stay out of their way. She answered every question but really could offer no valuable information. She had barely seen the back of the intruder’s head. And while it was impossible to identify the person who tried to break into her apartment, she was pretty certain that she knew who sent him.
O’Brien brought it up first, suggesting, “Maybe your boyfriend’s jealous.”
“You think it was him?”
O’Brien looked at the impressive array of FBI agents and NYPD detectives elbowing each other for space. “Tell you what. If it was just some druggie trying to make a score, I’d say he picked the wrong place.”
Connor had tried hard to be properly solicitous, but she made that difficult for him. Rather than being shaken by the attempt, she was actually excited. She was pumping adrenaline. “Don’t you see?” she told him when they had a few minutes by themselves. “This proves we’re bothering somebody. It’s like you say you like to do, shake the bushes and see what drops on your head. The bureau’s got to pay attention to this now.”
Slattery was waiting expectantly for them. He was as animated as Russo had ever seen him, a big bag of nervous energy. She immediately assured him that she was perfectly all right.
“Great,” he said distractedly, and never said another word about it. Instead, he waved a folder at them. “You two need to see this stuff right now.”
They were seated in the conference room, at the far end of a long mahogany table. O’Brien was next to Russo, Slattery across from them. He handed them each a copy of the complete file. It contained three separate reports. “The first one’s a transcript of a conversation that took place yesterday inside the club,” he explained. “Apparently our boy San Filippo had met with Cosentino.” Slattery turned to the second page and scanned down with his index finger. “Here, go to the second page. Right in the middle.” He read aloud, “‘San Filippo: Two-Gun says we gotta find this guy by Thursday night.’ LaRocca then says . . .”
“Who’s that?” O’Brien wondered.
Russo told him. “Little Eddie.”
“Oh, that’s right. You never hear him called that.”
“‘LaRocca,’” Slattery repeated, returning to the transcript. “‘What the fuck’s so important about then? San Filippo: (Unintelligible) says that (unintelligible) doesn’t tell me anything. But he was pretty fucking serious about it. LaRocca: Yeah, well, shit.’” Slattery looked up from the transcript. “So what’s happening Thursday night?”
O’Brien took a shot. “The Mad Mongol’s wrestling Don ‘Demon Seed’ Stevens?”
Slattery ignored him and looked at Russo. She shook her head, then said, “Whatever it is, the professor’s part of it.” She bit down on her lower lip, a habit she’d developed many years earlier. “I just don’t get it. Where’s the connection?”
“Here,” Slattery said, turning to the second report. “Look at this.”
O’Brien laid his forearms on the table and began reading what appeared to be a toxicology report.
Slattery continued, “It’s the report from the crime lab. They made it a priority.” Specifically it was from the Chemistry Unit. As O’Brien and Russo read through the technical jargon, Slattery interpreted it for them. “Before they killed Skinny Al, they burned out both his eardrums with cigarettes . . .”
Russo winced involuntarily. It was difficult to hear that without imagining it. The pain must have been extraordinary.
“. . . and so what happened, and this is actually pretty interesting, when they pushed the lit cigarette into his ear, they knocked off the ash, but they also knocked off a few fragments of unburned tobacco. And the ear, the ear’s sort of like a cup holder. When something that small gets inside there, it stays there. The coroner found a minuscule amount of unburned tobacco . . .” Slattery couldn’t help editorializing. “This guy did a great job. And then he sent it along to the lab.
“It got sent to the Chem-Tox Unit. The agent there . . .” He searched the report for a name. “Martz, this Martz, he analyzed the tobacco sample. The mass spec, fluoroscope, whatever thingamajigs he had, he got a profile for the tobacco. Then he sent somebody out to buy packs of every brand of cigarettes they could find and profiled that tobacco. First thing they discovered . . .” He paused. “Either you guys want to guess?”
Once again O’Brien couldn’t resist a straight line. “Smoking’s bad for your health?”
“It wasn’t an American brand. The tobacco was much too strong.”
Russo was beginning to make the connection in her mind.
“So they went up to the foreign tobacco and newspaper store on M Street and bought out the place. I think it was . . .” Once again he searched the report. “Yeah, here it is, seventy-two different brands from around the world. And they made a match.” He frowned. “I can’t read this name, but it’s Russian.”
“Shit,” O’Brien said with admiration, truly impressed. The implications were enormous.
“Are they sure?” Laura asked.
“Positive. They ran every test they could think of. It’s one of the most popular Russian brands. Apparently it was pretty easy to make the match. We got nothing like it here. You guys understand what this means, right?”
“It means we got trouble in River City,” O’Brien said. The evidence strongly indicated that Skinny Alphonse D’Angelo, a made member of organized crime, had been killed by a Russian. Not just killed. This wasn’t a mugging or a robbery, it wasn’t any accident, this was slow, torturous murder. There was obviously a reason he was killed, and that he was tortured, meaning that there had to have been some prior interaction between Skinny Al and the Russians that didn’t go well.
Russo said it out loud. “So we got the Italians and the Russians in the same ballpark, don’t we?”
“Yep,” Slattery said evenly, “that we do.”
This was the match made in hell that law enforcement had long been dreading. The good news was that whatever happened between them, the result had been Skinny Al squashed into the trunk of a car. The bad news was that the Italians and the Russians were doing some kind of business. “Now, just wait a second,” Russo interjected. “I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but this is a pretty big leap we’re making here. We don’t have the slightest idea what this was about. There’s a pretty good chance it didn’t have anything to do with the families. Maybe it was just two guys fighting over a woman or something. Maybe it was territorial or a bad loan, maybe it was about the cold war. I mean, it could be absolutely anything. It doesn’t need to be the Apocalypse.”
“Yeah, you might be right,” O’Brien agreed. “It doesn’t need to be, except for the fact that on the same day they found Skinny Al doing his Hunchback imitation a Russian professor who had worked with him goes missing and hasn’t been seen since. There’s gotta be a connection there.”
“That’s what I think too,” Slattery agreed. “So now the question becomes, where does our professor fit into the whole picture?” He paused and glanced at Russo. “Russo, could you go get us some...”
Her incredulous look cut him off at his ego.
“I’ll get it,” O’Brien said quickly. “How do you want it?” There was a hot plate in the corner and on it was the perpetual pot of coffee. Slattery wanted his regular. O’Brien poured one regular, one with milk and no sugar for himself, and one for Russo—black and strong.
“Let’s look at this logically,” Russo said, rising. A blackboard on wheels had been pushed against a side wall. She picked up a stub of yellow chalk and started writing. “Whatta we got? We got an Italian who speaks English. We got a professor who speaks English and Russian. And we got a Russian who may or may not speak English, but definitely speaks Russian.” She drew a lot of arrows. “To me it looks like Gradinsky’s interpreting Russian for the Italians. I don’t know what else it could be.”
When stressed, Slattery gnawed at the ridge of skin bordering his fingernails. It was a habit that had long ago proved impossible to break. He’d tried everything, from bandages to Mercurochrome, but nothing had worked. It’s easy to stop doing it, Slattery liked to tell people, paraphrasing Mark Twain on smoking—in fact, I’ve already done it fifty or sixty times. So as he sat there watching Russo write down her equation, he started biting his skin. “Let’s just say you’re right, okay?” he said when she finished. “That still doesn’t get us any closer to the professor.”
O’Brien was slowly stirring his coffee with his finger. “Here’s the thing that I don’t get. What do the Italians need the Russians for? They already control pretty much every place except Brighton Beach, and they sure as hell ain’t going to the mattresses for that. So? What?” They were stuck at the intersection of Mafia and Russian Mob without any idea which way to go. He picked up the third report in the file, asking, “What’s this one?”
Russo ignored his questions. “At least we got some idea how the professor fits into the whole picture.” She drew an arc from Italian to Russian. “It turns out the professor is the missing link.”
O’Brien just couldn’t resist. “And all this time I thought that was Arnold Schwarzenegger.” After pausing briefly for the laugh that never came, he repeated his question to Slattery. “What else we got here?”
What they had were the initial results of the expanded investigation Slattery had initiated. The FBI’s New York field office was second in size and budget only to the Washington, D.C., headquarters. Approximately twelve hundred agents were assigned to New York, and at any point they would be working about 25,000 different cases, ranging in importance from interstate car theft to national security. These agents had about five thousand regularly paid informants and maybe another five thousand who would drop a dime when necessary. In addition to O’Brien and Russo, four agents had been assigned temporarily to this case, which for administrative purposes had been designated MisPro, obviously meaning “missing professor.”
An actual FBI investigation isn’t nearly as intricate as usually dramatized by television or in the movies. There isn’t a whole lot of trickery or cleverness involved. Mostly it’s just a lot of hard work. Almost every investigation begins with the collection of a massive amount of readily available information. Telephone numbers to middle names. These four agents were doing the basic background work, gathering all the material necessary to create a snapshot of Professor Peter Gradinsky at this moment in his life. The material included his personal data provided by the university, transcripts of interviews conducted a day earlier with four of his colleagues in the Slavic Studies Department, a graduate assistant, and two West End Avenue neighbors, telephone and credit card records and canceled checks for the previous three months. Among the receipts was a copy of the seventy-five-dollar charge from the Heights Tavern.
O’Brien and Russo spent several minutes reading the summary: Peter Edmund Gradinsky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, George, had emigrated to America from what was then the Ukraine prior to World War II. He settled in Cleveland, sponsored by a distant cousin. It was there he met and married Beatrice Miller of Shaker Heights. Three years after Peter was born they had a second child, a daughter they named Diana. Diana was currently living in Chicago with her husband, Charles Berkow, a commodities trader. The family had lived on Chicago’s West Side. Peter attended public elementary and secondary schools, graduating from the High School for the Humanities. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1960 from Colgate University, a highly competitive liberal arts college in upstate New York, where he majored in political science. It was at Colgate, in the midst of the cold war, that he became fascinated by Russian culture. He received his postgraduate degree in Russian language studies from Columbia, intending to work as a translator for a multinational corporation doing business with the Soviet Union, but instead accepted an offer to stay at the university and teach. He supplemented his income as a freelance translator for corporations, among them U.S. Steel and IBM, as well as the State Department, and had earned a minor literary reputation for his acclaimed translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. After a perfunctory FBI investigation nine years earlier he had received a Secret clearance, enabling him to work for the government. There was no indication that he had had access to any sensitive government materials, nothing that might be of interest to a foreign government. Most of his work had been done for the Department of Commerce involving trade agreements . . .
This went on for another page, listing more details of his life, including his degrees, honors, and a long list of clubs and organizations to which he belonged, ranging from Who’s Who Among American Professors to the American Society of Professional Translators to AAA. Using the shorthand he’d invented, COB, O’Brien copied much of this information into his notebook.
As they read the material, Slattery excused himself to return to his office, telling them, “I got to call Washington. Apparently they didn’t find my folder where it was supposed to be lost, so I’m still persona nonexistent.”
From the interviews with the other members of his department, it became clear that Gradinsky was well respected and reasonably well liked, but that he had no close friends among his peers. He was considered an excellent teacher and was popular with his students. While no one considered him to be the star of the department, he was described as “reliable,” “dependable,” “extremely hardworking,” and “solid, a rock.” His teaching style was described as “the usual,” “without any real flair,” and “appropriate.” No one knew anything about his tastes in music, movies, or even television. He was considered “extremely supportive” of his students and was known for spending hours of his free time working with students who needed additional help. In fact, his graduate assistants liked to hang out in his office, which was described by the one graduate student who had been interviewed as “overflowing with piles of paperwork that he would put on the floor if somebody really needed a place to sit down.”
Without exception everyone described him as passionate about his work and a very private person. Only a few of his colleagues had ever met his wife, and none of them had ever been to his home, or even knew of anyone else in the department who had been. The exception was Geraldine Simon. Her duties as departmental secretary included answering his phone when he wasn’t in the office and scheduling his appointments. The professor paid her a little extra to take care of the scheduling and billing for his freelance work. Simon spoke to Grace Gradinsky regularly, mostly about such matters. She had been to the Gradinsky apartment several times, usually to drop off materials, but she had been invited to dinner on two occasions. In her interview she referred to him as “a true gentleman.”
Geri Simon also mentioned that she had noticed minor changes in him the past few months. He seemed somewhat distracted, she said, occasionally missing appointments and misplacing personal items. He had also been doing a lot more freelance work, which kept him out of the office more often than usual. And for the first time, he insisted on personally handling the billing and payments for this work. Simon remembered that among the companies for which he’d worked were Random House, Time Inc., McDonnell Douglas, and Pan Am. There were several more that she could not remember, and she did not recall him working for any private clients. He didn’t seem to be spending more money than usual—in fact, she’d laughed at that question, responding, “More money than usual?”—but she did point out that she was probably not the right person to ask about that.
It took them much of the afternoon to dig through all the material. They drank lunch, bottled water for Russo, Coke and coffee for O’Brien. And from time to time, as they worked, Russo found herself sneaking glances at him, as if she were back in the library at Ohio State being very careful not to get caught peeking at the Buckeyes’ star running back. She noticed that O’Brien would occasionally leaf back through his notebook, sometimes spending several minutes searching until he found what he was looking for. “Anything?” she asked once.
He responded with a half-shrug, which she interpreted as a good strong maybe. “I don’t know yet. Tell you later.”
Slattery returned later that afternoon, still officially lost. “All right, here’s what’s going on,” he said, still charged with enthusiasm. “This Russian connection has gotten the assistant director’s attention. He’s calling out the cavalry. He wants to know what’s the big deal about Thursday night. So for the next six days this gets a Priority designation, meaning we pretty much get whatever support we need.”
A Priority designation. That was a big deal. Washington was watching. This case definitely had the potential to move their careers—but depending on the outcome, that move could be either up or down. Slattery helped them lay out a strategy. All the agents in the city working either organized crime or counterintelligence would be asked to squeeze their informants for rumors as well as facts. As all three of them knew, within organized crime rumors tended to be the shadows of facts. Transcripts of conversations that had taken place in the Freemont Avenue Social Club over the past six weeks would be reviewed to see if any leads might have been overlooked, as would all surveillance reports covering members of both Franzone’s and Cosentino’s crews.
The bureau liaison to the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit would reach out to his counterpart to see if they’d felt this particular breeze, although Slattery agreed with O’Brien and Russo that at least for the present the cops would not be brought into the case. Personally none of them had anything against the cops—there were some fine detectives in the NYPD—but the reality was that the 25,000-cop force leaked information worse than a roof made of old newspapers.
As the afternoon began easing into evening, and they finally began collecting all the paperwork and cleaning up the conference room, Slattery remembered to ask Laura Russo, “That thing last night, you sure you’re okay?”
Fine, she told him.
Even after all these years Slattery was still not entirely comfortable treating male and female agents equally. “You know, if you’d feel more comfortable staying in a hotel tonight, the office’ll pick up the tab.”
She flashed him her most demure look. “Why, you old softie you.”
Slattery actually blushed. He averted his face so she wouldn’t see it, but she did. “Anyway,” he continued, “we’re gonna keep the watchers outside your place for a few days. But I doubt whoever it was is coming back.”
When they finally got outside, Russo glanced at her watch. It was still much too early for it to have been such a long day. They walked around the corner to the Mountway Deli. O’Brien preferred it because its booths offered at least a hint of privacy. The city was in the midst of its daily transition from day to play. The streets were jammed with people on their way home or to restaurants, movies, concerts, sports events—the many million places for fun in New York—where they would resume the lives they’d left behind that morning.
To Russo it just seemed like everybody was racing somewhere important. Like the whole world was on the way to an exciting party to which she hadn’t been invited. Her life seemed stuck in one gear: Special Agent Laura Russo. She was her job; her job was her. Lately the only differences between day and night in her life were the light and the temperature. The only male in her life was Buck, and he had four legs, a tail, and slept on her head. It’s my choice, she reminded herself, my choice, my choice, my choice.
As they settled into a booth, O’Brien took his notebook from his jacket pocket. Folded sheets of paper he’d stuffed between specific pages started falling out. When he tried to catch them, other papers did the same. Then the book seemed to leap out of his hand, and as he grabbed for it, still more papers fell out. Russo started laughing and didn’t stop even when she realized the whole thing was an act performed for her benefit.
“Don’t give up your day job,” she advised him, patting his hand with mock sympathy. And then she added, “Or your night job.”
He collected all his papers, unfolded them, put them in a pile, and ironed them flat with his hand. “There,” he said, beaming proudly like a little kid.
That was part of his act too, she knew. But still it was cute. “What?”
“There,” he said, pointing at the papers. “There’s your real Professor Gradinsky.”
“I’m all ears.”
He made an exaggerated show of letting his eyes roam slowly up and down her body. Then, holding up his palms in protest, he said, “Boy, that is definitely not true.”
This time it was Russo who felt the rising warmth of embarrassment—and cut it off. “Ha, ha, ha,” she said as sarcastically as possible. “Okay, Agent O’Brien, let’s see what you got.”
“Okay. What I got is a whole lot of right angles that don’t make a square.” A waiter stood silently by the table, his order book poised for action. O’Brien looked up at him. “Look, we’re a little busy right now saving the world. Give us a few minutes.” The waiter nodded seriously and retreated. Connor continued, “Here, look at this. This is the list of clubs that he belongs to. Notice anything a little strange?”
She read down the list but nothing popped out. “What?”
“Remember how Grace told us they didn’t own a car? There was no reason for her to lie about that. It’s too easy to check. So now you tell me, how many guys you know who don’t own a car belong to the American Automobile Association?” He grinned proudly, showing her his teeth. “First thing we need to do is get somebody at Triple A to pull his membership card and get the plate number and model of the car he’s got registered with them.”
“Let me have some paper,” she said. He pulled a clean sheet from his notebook and handed it to her. She began making her own notes.
He continued, “So we know he’s not exactly the guy his wife told us he was. Then this next thing. Look how people described him.” He quoted from the reports: plain, mostly; nothing spectacular. “Now look at this.” He dug out several canceled checks from his paper pile. “So how come he’s spending $640 here, $235 here, here’s one for almost $400, all in Bloomingdale’s men’s department?”
Russo still didn’t get it. “He’s buying clothes, I guess.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, “I guess so too. Russo, you’re a woman, so let me ask you this. Why would a man who for his whole life apparently has shown no interest in clothes suddenly start shopping for a new wardrobe at Bloomies?”
She got it. “You think he’s got a girlfriend, don’t you?”
“There you go. It all fits. Remember what that secretary, Simon, said in her statement? He’s been acting differently lately, missing appointments, misplacing things.” He paused, then said emphatically, “Taking care of his own finances at the office, because if good old Grace doesn’t know how much comes in, then she sure as hell doesn’t know how much goes out. And notice that he’s paying by check instead of using his credit card. I’ll bet I know who sees the credit card bill and who gets his canceled checks.” He started humming the first bars of “On the Street Where You Live,” trusting that Laura would know that in My Fair Lady that song was sung by a love-crazed character.
While Russo had a lot of faith in mankind, her experiences had taught her to have a lot less faith in individual men. She had learned from her former husband that married men do have affairs. In that situation apparently the only thing the other woman had that she didn’t was a criminal record, which made it even tougher to understand. In so many ways that experience had shaped every day thereafter. But the Professor Peter Gradinsky who had been created in her mind just didn’t seem like that type. That Gradinsky had been solid, a bit of a nerd. He didn’t seem real desirable. She frowned and thought, they fool you.
The waiter returned. “Excuse me,” he said. “You people finished saving the world?” Once again his pen was poised for business against his order book.
Russo found herself anticipating O’Brien’s response to that straight line. It was like throwing a slow ball to Babe Ruth. “Yeah,” he said, handing over the menu, “I’ll have a burger, please. Medium.”
“That’s it?” she said to him, actually disappointed.
“I’m not that hungry,” he explained, then added, “And give me a cherry Coke too, please.”
After Laura had ordered her tuna on whole wheat hold the coleslaw, she picked up the thread. “There’s another thing I noticed,” she said. She leafed through O’Brien’s papers until she found the transcript of the interview with his graduate assistant. “See what she says about his office, that she had to take piles of papers off the chairs to sit down?” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You saw the apartment. It looked like the soup cans were alphabetized. He’s obviously a totally different person in his office than he is at home. I have this theory that being messy is genetic. There’s no such thing as being half-neat. Either you are or you aren’t.”
O’Brien considered that. After several years spent believing that one day he really was going to clean out his closet and all the drawers in his bureau, desk, and file cabinet, and feeling guilty every time he looked at them, he had come to the realization that that day was never going to come. He had accepted the fact that on the day he died his apartment was going to be a mess. And after that epiphany he had never felt guilty about it again. Russo was absolutely right. He is who he is. And he is messy.
Russo reached for her conclusion. “Believe me, if Grace had followed him around with a vacuum cleaner and a hatchet, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t help himself. But that apartment was immaculate. I mean, come on, the mail was perfectly stacked, the magazines were squared. She was putting on a show for us that everything was fine.”
“You think she knows, then?”
That could easily have been the beginning of a long and heartfelt discussion, in which she would have explained womankind to him. Instead, she said flatly, “Women always know.”
To show his appreciation for her good work, he lifted the bread basket and offered, “You want another roll?”
She pushed it away. “Okay, let’s look at this again.” She picked up the pen and got ready to take some notes. “Assuming we’re right, assuming he’s got a girlfriend, how does that help us?” She put down the pen and sighed. “This thing keeps getting more and more complicated. I mean, at this point about the only thing we know for sure is that at least he’s breathing well enough to use his credit card.”
O’Brien cleared his throat and said softly, “There’s one more thing I have to tell you. He didn’t sign that credit card receipt.”
“Tuna on whole wheat?” the waiter said.
Not one thing in the Gradinskys’ apartment had been moved an inch since their last visit; including, O’Brien noted, Grace Gradinsky’s hair. It looked as if it had been frozen in place by Captain Kirk’s phaser. She had greeted them nervously, assuming they had wanted to deliver some news in person. Laura explained quickly that they just needed to ask her a few more questions. Once again they sat on the couch and she sat on the edge of the chair opposite them. O’Brien took the credit card receipt from his notebook and handed it to her. “Do you recognize this, Mrs. Gradinsky?”
She was not wearing her glasses. She held it an arm’s length away, obviously so she could read it, but it made it appear as if she were keeping her distance from something distasteful. She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, I don’t think so.” She handed it back to him. “Why?”
“That’s funny, that was my question to you.” There was a directness in his voice that Russo had not heard before. And all the warmth was gone.
Grace stood up. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing . . .”
“Mrs. Gradinsky, misleading a federal agent is a serious crime. Don’t make us do something about it.” Russo glanced at him. There was absolutely no such crime, serious or frivolous. But obviously Grace Gradinsky didn’t know that. “Remember this,” he said, laying his notebook down in front of her. It was open to the page on which she had written her husband’s medical information. Next to it he laid down the credit card slip. Even at a glance it was obvious that the handwriting in his notebook and the signature on the bottom of the slip were the same. It was quite florid; handwriting experts might describe it as “lyrical.” The bowls were unusually rounded and several letters were made with additional loops. It was unique. Clearly Grace Gradinsky had gone to the restaurant and paid the bill with her husband’s credit card, signing his name. “Now, why don’t you just sit down and tell me why you did this?”
She sat down gracefully. Laura noticed that her lips were tensed almost white, evidence that her anger was fighting to get out. “If you’re such a good detective,” she said evenly, “then where’s my husband?”
Laura tried to calm the situation. “Mrs. Gradinsky, we’re doing everything possible . . .”
O’Brien was having none of it. “I asked you why you did it,” he repeated.
She looked down at the extremely clean carpet, defeated. “I didn’t plan it,” she began. “I just . . . I was looking for him. We’ve eaten dinner there several times. I thought there was a chance he might be there.” She paused to steady herself, clinging desperately to the remains of her dignity. “I guess I stayed a little longer than I expected.” She looked at Russo. “You know how you watch the door, and you have the feeling that the next time it opens he’s going to walk in?”
“Yeah,” Russo agreed, “yeah, I do.” And that was true, it was a feeling she knew well.
“So while I waited I had something to eat. I really haven’t had much of an appetite lately, I’m sure you understand. Then I had a few drinks. It made the night pass. I didn’t even know I had Peter’s credit card with me until I went to pay. So I used it; they didn’t even look at it. They let me put a few dollars extra on it for cash for a cab. I forgot all about it until you . . . until you two showed up. I was so worried that you were going to forget about him. I mean, it’s not like it’s some big case, he’s just a college professor . . .” She looked away.
Russo was sympathetic. “So you figured the receipt would keep us interested?”
O’Brien didn’t wait for a response. “And there was no phone call from any Russian, was there?”
“Yes,” she said, responding to Russo’s question, “because that way you’d believe he was still alive.”
When she said that, Laura Russo literally felt a chill wash over her body.
Grace Gradinsky’s answer was true if less than complete. She saw no reason to tell them that after Slattery had called her so excitedly, she’d contacted Bobby San Filippo for exactly the same reason: to make sure that the Mafia continued to search for her husband.
O’Brien didn’t even change his tone. “That phone call,” he said, making what he thought was a pretty good guess, “there was no Russian, was there?”
His question seemed to momentarily confuse her. “Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, somebody called and he went right out. But I don’t know who it was.” She sighed deeply. “It could have been anybody. I don’t know, really I don’t.”
“All right,” O’Brien agreed. “But just one more thing.” He searched through his overstuffed notebook until he found the sloppily folded surveillance photograph of Bobby Blue Eyes and Little Eddie on the steps of the Gradinskys’ brownstone. He laid it down in front of her. “Who are these guys?”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
He tapped the photo. “This is why you didn’t call the cops, right?”
“Please.” She looked to Russo for help.
“Hey, it’s your life,” O’Brien said almost flippantly. “Either you want to find your husband or you don’t. But I got to tell you something, Mrs. Gradinsky. I’m getting a little tired of your bullshit. Now, here’s the reality of this situation: Russo and I, we’re civil service employees. Pretty much whatever happens our jobs are protected; so are our pensions. You don’t want to help us, that’s fine, I got a big pile of cases sitting on my desk. I’ll just go back to the office and put this one on the bottom and work another one. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m gonna get the same paycheck.”
Russo reached across the table and took Grace Gradinsky’s hand. She squeezed it reassuringly. Civil service? she thought. He really is out of his mind.
Grace Gradinsky told them all she knew about her husband’s disappearance. She knew only the first names of the two men in the photograph, Bobby and Eddie—at least she believed the heavyset man’s name was Eddie. They had come to the apartment the day after Russo and O’Brien’s first visit and had asked a lot of the same questions. Several times in the past, she admitted, her husband had done some work for “the boys,” as he mysteriously referred to them. When she had asked him if he meant the Mafia, he’d smiled but did not deny it. The only person he had ever mentioned by name was a “Skinny Al,” and then only because he supposedly weighed three hundred pounds. Grace specifically remembered that this Skinny man’s name was Al because she really loved Bill Cosby’s character Fat Albert.
O’Brien was surprised. Grace Gradinsky was a talking avalanche: Once she started talking, pretty much nothing slowed her down. Occasionally, she continued, without any warning her husband wouldn’t come home for two or three days. The first time it happened she was frantic, but just as she was about to call the police, he came home. He told her firmly that when he was working “for the boys,” she was not, under any circumstances, to contact the police. If the police found out what he was doing, he warned her, it could put his life in jeopardy.
No, she didn’t know what he was doing for them. He never told her. Obviously, though, it involved translating of some kind because, she explained, “There really isn’t anything else Peter could do for the Mafia.”
When he disappeared this time, she assumed he was with them. O’Brien was correct, that’s why she didn’t file a report with the police. But when “these two,” she said, indicating the men in the photograph, told her they didn’t know where he was, she didn’t know what to do. “You see the problem that I had,” she pleaded with Connor. “I couldn’t exactly tell the police that I was worried because my husband might not be with the Mafia.”
That photograph of the two couples had been taken on their anniversary, at a restaurant named Gino’s. They were with their friends George and Pearl Zelma. Peter had suggested the restaurant, telling them he’d met the owner, and they had a lovely evening. “You two should try it one day,” she said. Neither agent responded to that suggestion. At the beginning of the meal the waiter had delivered a bottle of champagne to their table, which he said was compliments of the owner. No one ever referred to him as “Gino,” only as “the owner,” which she thought was a little pretentious.
That was it. She pleaded with them to continue looking for her husband, and O’Brien informed her that “the entire New York office is looking for him. But anything else you think of, you got to call us right away. And if those two schmegegis show up”—he pointed at her for emphasis—“you call us right away.”
She agreed to do that.
O’Brien and Russo walked up West End Avenue in contemplative silence. Russo finally said with sadness, “She doesn’t have the slightest idea, does she?”
“No,” he agreed, and Laura heard the resignation in his voice as he finished, “she doesn’t.”
O’Brien suggested stopping by the Heights Tavern one more time just to see how fast Gravy could run, but she told him that neither the joke nor the idea was very funny. He offered to drive her downtown but she refused, as he was certain she would. They stood on the corner of West End and 76th Street for several minutes waiting for a cab. “You don’t have to wait,” she told him. “I’m fine.”
“It’s a habit,” he said as an empty cab stopped across the street. Connor spotted it at almost exactly the same time as a man with a briefcase who was waiting with a woman, about halfway down the block on the west side of West End Avenue. Connor and the man locked eyes for an instant, which was all it took for both of them to recognize the New Yorker in the other, and then they took off after the prize. The other man had the advantage of being on the same side of the street as the cab, but Connor didn’t even hesitate. He prided himself on being an expert at the city shuffle. He dived right into the traffic, one eye on the oncoming cars, the other on his competition. Connor figured the guy would be slowed by his briefcase, but the man was swinging it hard enough to give him some forward momentum. Connor was forced to hesitate in the middle of the street for an ambulance, and it looked certain that the cab would be lost. He considered using the going-to-the-hospital ploy, a New York gambit that carried with it absolutely no guarantee of success. Once he’d actually heard someone respond to that line, “Too bad, I’ve got tickets to Cats!”
It turned out not to be necessary. The guy stepped out of his shoe—and actually stopped to retrieve it! Losing a cab just because a shoe came off? Out-of-towner, Connor thought smugly.
He had his hand on the door handle seconds before his opponent limped up. Connor smiled at him. “I need this cab,” the guy said urgently. “I got to get my wife to the hospital.”
O’Brien looked down the block. A woman was standing on the curb, holding her coat closed with her left hand, seemingly slightly bent over. It was impossible to determine anything about her from that distance. It was a cab-or-Cats moment: Connor relented. There was nothing else he could do. “Sure,” he said, opening the door and stepping aside.
“Thanks,” the man said, slipping into the backseat. Connor closed the door and watched as the cab shot forward to the woman and stopped. The rear door was pushed open and she got in. A little too sprightly, he thought suspiciously. It was at least five minutes before another empty cab appeared. When it stopped, Laura opened the door for herself. And O’Brien realized he didn’t have the slightest idea how to say good night to her. If she were a man, he would shake her hand, but after all the time they’d spent together the past few days, he would have felt ridiculous shaking her hand. And he certainly would have felt awkward giving her a light kiss. So he ran for the high ground and did neither. “You’re all right?” he asked.
She solved the problem for him. “I’m fine,” she said, and then gave him a friendly kiss on his cheek as she got into the cab.
O’Brien stood in the street watching her cab drive away.
All the way home Laura Russo thought about the investigation. It was being run like a game of checkers, she decided. They were moving forward very slowly across the entire width of the board, taking advantage of whatever openings they spotted rather than committing to a single strategy. We’re not going to get there in time, she thought.
Most of the time agents live surprisingly normal lives—punctuated by occasional bursts of frenzied activity. About the only personal things O’Brien had gotten done the past few days were buy fresh orange juice, replenish his supply of Mallomars, then flip through his mail, throwing away the junk and tossing the bills on his desk.
There were twenty-six messages waiting for him on his answering machine: He had won a three-day vacation to Disneyland that entitled him to participate in “an extraordinary real estate opportunity.” He had been selected to receive a financial newsletter available to only “a few insiders.” There were three beeping attempts to send him a fax, there was a wrong number from someone speaking rapidly in Spanish, and all the rest were the bits and pieces of the life of an attractive single man with several close friends in New York City: What are you doing Friday night? Beep. Just checking in. Beep. I think I met somebody you might like. Beep. It’s Fred, what do you know about the Rappoport case? Beep. Hey, Con, you still have Nancy’s phone number, the one we met at Marty’s? Beep. Hey, pal, you’ll never guess what happened. Beep. Did I leave my compact, a little gold one with my initials on it, in your apartment? Beep. I got three tickets for the Knicks next Tuesday, you interested? Beep. You see that piece about organized crime moving down to Wall Street in the Week in Review? Beep. I got a funny story to tell you. Beep. And finally, three increasingly desperate calls from Mops, wondering where he was, asking why he hadn’t returned her phone calls, and reminding him once again that she was “the only mother you have.” As he sifted through his bills, he called her back. She told him, “I was calling you because Belle was missing and I was frantic.”
Belle was her Chihuahua. “She’s under your bed,” Connor told her, having had this conversation several times before. “Behind the shoe boxes.” Mops admitted she’d found her sleeping there an hour earlier, then segued into other topics, among them getting together for dinner, going to his nephew’s soccer game, and by the way, how was the rest of his life? “The rest of his life” was Mops-speak for are you dating someone I should know about and why aren’t you married yet and why do you do this to me?
Connor marveled at her ability to so easily reduce him to his simplest parts. In a single phone call he traveled the vast distance between a well-respected FBI agent heading a significant investigation and being his mother’s son. When he finally got off the phone, it took him considerable time to bounce back. During any investigation it’s vitally important that the investigators take time away from the case just to step back and get a little perspective both on the case and on their lives. Connor’s plans to catch up with his life evaporated with that phone call. Instead, he opened his notebook and started reading through it from front to back, trying to find the connections that were always there.
He was finishing his second cup of coffee when Diana Thomas called. “What are you doing right now?” she asked.
He thought seriously about it. Diana was a very attractive woman who obviously had a thing for him. “You know,” he decided, “I got all this work I need to get done. Give me a few days.”
After hanging up he stared at the telephone for a few minutes, then picked it up again and dialed Russo’s number. She answered curtly, on the first ring. “Hello?”
“It’s me. I’m just going through my notes and there’re a couple of things I’m curious about,” he said. And then he remembered, “Hey, excuse me. Are you okay?”
She was sitting on the floor in front of her fireplace, dressed in flannel pajamas, rereading Slattery’s documents as she enjoyed her one glass of wine. An artificial log was providing just enough light and warmth for her needs. She leaned back against the couch and picked up her wineglass. The log was made of compressed paper, but it could have been real.