Dead Man's Rule (7 page)

Sergei looked him in the eye and decided he was telling the truth. He smiled and patted Filimonov on the back. “Thank you for your help, Yuri. Have a nice day.”

Filimonov’s face relaxed. “You won’t be making any calls?”

Sergei’s grin widened. “About what?”

Nicki Zinoviev’s criminal file arrived on Sergei’s desk the next morning. Zinoviev had emigrated from the Soviet Union twenty years ago, possibly because of legal problems there, though of course that wasn’t what he had put on his immigration forms. The file said he was forty-two, but he looked at least five years older in his most recent mug shot.
But then, most people do,
thought Sergei,
particularly if they’re using
.

Zinoviev had two convictions for drug possession, including one for half a kilo of heroin. He’d been sentenced to two years for that one but had gotten out after eleven months based on good behavior and alleged progress in a drug-treatment program. While he was still on probation, though, he’d been busted for conspiracy to sell drugs and carrying a concealed weapon. He had avoided more jail time by cooperating with prosecutors, but he might have cooperated a little too well—he later picked up a perjury conviction for some of his testimony against his former business partners.

After forty-five minutes, Sergei closed the manila folder and plopped it on the to-be-filed pile. Nikolai Zinoviev was just what Filimonov had said he was: a retail-level dealer and gofer with a drug problem. Turning state’s evidence in the conspiracy case would have ended his career (among other things) if he had been in the mafia or the Russian
Organizatsiya
, but Russian and ex-Soviet crime in the United States was much less organized than it was in the former Soviet Union. There were no real loyalty rules here, so Zinoviev’s betrayal simply meant that his remaining colleagues would never trust him, confining him to small, low-level roles in any operation.

Sergei had lunch at the Petrograd, a small restaurant of what he called the “borscht and babushka” type: lots of traditional food listed on the cheap laminated menus, lots of middle-aged and older women talking away the afternoon over sweet tea, very little English being spoken.

Little streamers of cigarette smoke rose from most of the tables before blowing away in the currents from the ventilation gratings. The walls displayed the mandatory “No Smoking” signs, but the patrons viewed these as purely decorative—which they were in places like the Petrograd. Sergei didn’t mind. The smell of harsh Russian tobacco awakened fond memories of visiting his grandparents when he was young.

He sat down at the counter and called to an elderly, aproned woman standing at the far end. “Good afternoon, Auntie Olga. How are you today?”

“I’m as well as an old lady can expect,” she said, putting down some dishes and walking over to him. “But I’m still depressed about the Bears. When are they going to get a back that can actually run the ball?” She looked at Sergei as if she expected him to know the answer.

“Good question. Kozlowski’s a good bulldozer if they only need two or three yards, but he never gets much more than that. They could sure use someone with some real speed and evasiveness.”

“Maybe,” Olga said. “But you are not just here to talk football, am I right?”

She was right. Olga Yanayev was his mother’s second cousin, but she was also the widow of one of the top bosses in the Moscow
mafiya
and the mother of two others. Her sons did no business in the United States—otherwise she would have had nothing to do with Sergei except at family reunions. However, she knew most of what went on in the local
mafiya
underworld, especially if it involved dealings with Russia. She and her husband had moved to Chicago when he’d retired, so that they could be near extended family and good hospitals, which he had needed because of his diabetes. It finally killed him two years ago, and he had left her a small fortune of dubious origin. She worked in the restaurant because it was a convenient way to talk to her friends and hear news, not because she needed the money.

“Of course you’re right,” Sergei said with a smile. “I came for the borscht and black bread too. And for the chance to visit with you.”

She left to tend to her other customers and came back a few minutes later with his food. “Here’s the borscht and bread. Now let’s have the visit.” She walked around the counter and sat on the stool next to him and eyed him shrewdly. “Let’s be frank. You want to ask me something, and I want to ask you something too. Since you’re the guest, I’ll let you ask first. What is it?”

“Do you know Nicki Zinoviev?”

She shrugged slightly. “I know of him. He’s a small fish for you, isn’t he?”

“But not for my client. Nicki broke a contract to sell a safe-deposit box because he got a better offer from someone else. My job is to find out who that someone else is. I think it might be the Brothers. Do you know where I can find their names and addresses?”

“I can get them for you.”

“Thanks. Do you know if they’re trying to buy something from Zinoviev?”

“I don’t know what they’re doing. Why would they tell me?”

“I didn’t think they would, but it never hurts to ask.”

“Sometimes it does,” she observed. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Fire away,” said Sergei with a relaxed smile that hid a heightened alertness. She was his auntie, but she was also a very shrewd lady with her own agenda and a remarkable ability to read between the lines. He’d have to choose his words carefully.

“What are the Chechens up to around here?”

“Lots of stuff,” he said. “You know that.”

The Chechens had been fixtures in the Chicago crime scene for years. When Sergei was still with the Bureau, for instance, he had helped break up a sex-slavery ring on the North Side, allegedly run by Chechens. Recently, there had been a string of beatings, robberies, and murders targeting the Russian community, and a lot of people suspected Chechen gangs. Sergei had heard through the grapevine that the FBI was in the midst of a large investigation aimed at putting a stop to these attacks, but of course he couldn’t say that.

Olga looked him in the eye for several seconds. “You know what the problem with those evasive running backs is? If you catch them, they go down hard.” She smiled and patted his hand so that he wouldn’t take her comment too hard, just hard enough.

Sergei smiled back. He knew she wasn’t really threatening him, but he also stopped evading her questions. “You know from the papers that someone’s been attacking Russians over the past few months and that it’s probably a Chechen gang or gangs. All I can tell you is that law enforcement is aware of the problem and taking steps to deal with it.”

“Are the gangs taking orders from Grozny?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“My boy Kolya heard that a gang based near Grozny might be trying to put together something here. Not Obshina. Someone else. He heard they were buying a brewery in the western suburbs, but that doesn’t make any sense, because they’re Muslims.”

“Think it might be a cover for a meth lab?”

She nodded. “That’s what scares me. If they try to push into the drug market in an organized way, there could be a war. Maybe they’re attacking people now to build a reputation for the future.”

“If I hear anything that I can tell you, I will,” he assured her.

“You’re such a good boy,” she said with an affectionate smile. They had learned what they needed from each other and the conversation turned to other topics, but a lingering worry remained in the back of Sergei’s mind. Criminals from the former Soviet Union, particularly Obshina and other Chechen gangs, tended to be brutal, smart, well educated, and highly effective when organized. In Russia they had corrupted most major businesses and all levels of government so badly that they had become a serious threat to the country’s stability. For some reason, ex-Soviet criminals in America almost never organized in gangs of more than half a dozen, which made them much less effective. It would be bad if that changed. Very bad.

“So, Mr. Ivanovsky, you say that you paid $5,000 in cash to Mr. Zinoviev for something you had never seen?” said Janet Anderson, a junior partner working with Anthony Simeon on the
Ivanovsky
case.

Ben took a sip of coffee and awaited his client’s response with mild interest. Dr. Ivanovsky’s deposition had been going on now for two and a half hours, and he was doing well. Unlike many witnesses, he was doing exactly what Ben had told him to the evening before: listening carefully to Anderson’s questions, pausing before each answer to give Ben a chance to object if necessary, and answering the questions directly but without volunteering extra information, even if it were damaging to the other side—which would merely alert them to problems in their case. Also, Ben and Dr. Ivanovsky had practiced most of the questions that the opposing attorney had asked so far, which helped.

“Yes.”

“And the reason you weren’t able to see it is that American Union Bank was closed, correct?”

“Objection, asked and answered,” said Ben, who was a little annoyed that the other attorney was replowing old ground. “Just because the rules give you three hours doesn’t mean you have to use it all. If you don’t have any new questions, let’s call it a day.”

Anderson ignored Ben. “You can answer,” she said to Dr. Ivanovsky, which was true. If Ben didn’t instruct him not to answer (which he couldn’t do simply on the ground that Anderson was repeating herself), he had to.

“Yes,” he said again.

“Was American Union the only bank closed at that time?”

“No.”

“Was your bank closed?”

“Yes.”

Ben could see the concealed eagerness in her face and realized that she was about to spring her trap. This was a common tactic in depositions—asking hours of relatively harmless questions to tire the witness and get him off his guard, then trying to ambush him near the end. “You had to pay Mr. Zinoviev within two hours or the deal was off, right?”

“Yes.”

“But if your bank was closed, how were you able to get the money?”

“ATM.”

Her eyes gleamed. “But ATMs have withdrawal limits, don’t they?”

“Yes. I had to go to many ATMs. And then they would not give me more and I still did not have enough, so I must sell some things to secondhand stores and pawnshops. There are many receipts, which I gave to my lawyer.”

“You’ll find them at Bates numbers IVA000142 to 163, counsel,” said Ben, referring to the stamped numbers on the documents they had produced the day before.

There was a pause while she riffled through the stack of documents and found the appropriate pieces of paper. She glanced at them for a few seconds, then said, “Let’s take a five-minute break.”

Ben and Dr. Ivanovsky went out to the hallway for privacy. “How am I doing?” asked Dr. Ivanovsky as soon as the door was shut.

Ben glanced through the glass conference-room door and saw that Anderson had a calculator out. He smiled. He had added up the receipts two days ago and knew they would come out to $5,064. “Terrific. She’s gotten absolutely nothing useful out of this deposition. In fact, I think that last line of questioning was their great hope for destroying your case, and it completely cratered.”

“Cratered?” asked Dr. Ivanovsky with a puzzled look. “What does this mean?”

“You know how if you fire a rocket into space and it fizzles and falls back to earth, it makes a big hole in the ground, a big crater? Well, that’s what just happened to their theory that you couldn’t have gotten the $5,000 to pay Nicki because all the banks were closed.”

“Cratered,” repeated Dr. Ivanovsky, chortling happily. “I like that word here. Just like the early American satellite rockets. That is very funny. So you think they have no hope of destroying my case?”

“There are no guarantees,” Ben said, reciting the rote cautionary boilerplate of every confident lawyer. “Anything can happen at trial, and the other side has very good lawyers. But things are looking pretty good so far. The documents are inconclusive, but they’re all consistent with your story. It’ll basically come down to your word against Nicki’s. I still need to take his deposition, but I think you’ll be a lot more believable than him.”