Requiem For a Glass Heart (8 page)

S
HE BOUGHT CLOTHES BUT TOOK NO PLEASURE IN IT
. R
ATHER
, she shopped like someone buying equipment required for a particular job. She knew instinctively what Krupatin wanted, at least until he told her otherwise. Krupatin liked drama. But elegant drama, always in the best of taste, which he knew she had and which he expected her to use. He liked her to wear smart dress suits that complemented her hair and complexion. Strong colors like scarlet and black and emerald. He liked sometimes a slight military touch, an ivory suit with brocade on the sleeves and bodice, or scrolled soutache. A fiery red bouclé suit with black cord trim. A black coat-dress with a white shawl collar and white cuffs. Double-breasted suits of dark peacock or claret. For casual wear he liked trapeze dresses and sheaths, with the hemlines well above the knees to play up her long legs, or fine knit cottons with darts to emphasize her waist and bust. He favored liquid silk that draped over her body like a thin skim of water.

For two full days she did nothing but shop, trying on clothes, dictating precise alterations, and ordering things made up from fabrics that she preferred to the ones in stock. Then she had everything delivered to the townhouse in South Kensington. She unpacked it, put it all away, and settled in with the files Krupatin had left for her to absorb.

He called on the fourth day.

“Have you shopped?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read the notebooks?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. We’ll go to dinner this evening and talk. You’ve got something to wear for dinner?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated. “You sound surly.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m a little tired.”

“Take a nap. I’ll be there at eight o’clock.”

She wore a black silk evening dress with a jewel neck and an upper bodice and long sleeves of skin-tight chiffon, mere smoke next to her golden skin. A single pendent black pearl dangled from each ear.

Krupatin had reserved an alcove table for them at a French restaurant called Genevieve in Belgravia. He was at his charming best, and she saw him looking about with relish as heads turned to follow them through the crowded, intimate room to their table.

“You’ve lost nothing—
nothing
, Irina,” he said as they were seated. He saw no indelicacy in this remark. Did he think that what he had put her through in the past year would have affected her appearance? Did he think she might begin to rot like garbage?

He sat facing the mirrors so he could watch the men behind him stealing glances at her.

“God, I don’t know why you won’t dress like this all the time,” he said. “Why you don’t live a better life … You know, your kind of beauty, it’s perishable. You ought to enjoy it while you still have it.” He took his napkin, flapped it open, and picked up the wine list. “Good God, you have this martyr complex or something …” His voice trailed off as his attention turned to vintages.

After the wine steward took his order, Krupatin crossed his forearms on the table and leaned toward her with a smile of anticipation.

“Okay,” he said. “Wei Tsing.”

He was attractive, his rich gray hair particularly striking in the soft lights of the restaurant. And he was repulsive. He did not consider her a human being. If God was a Jew, she thought, Satan had to be a Russian.

“Fifty-two years old,” she began slowly. “Born and reared in a wealthy Hong Kong family. His father was a taipan for an Australian construction conglomerate. Educated in Britain—-he received a master’s in economics from Oxford University. After returning to Hong Kong, he took most of the trust money from his father and invested it in establishing a new trafficking organization to bring heroin out of the Golden Triangle. This was during the Vietnam War, when drug consumption was exploding in the United States. By the age of thirty he was a multimillionaire. But Tsing was intelligent—”

“Wei,” Krupatin interrupted. “With Chinese it’s backward. If you call him Tsing, you’re using his first name. You can’t do that. It’s Mr. Wei. It’s pronounced
way
in English.”

“He smuggled arms to the North Vietnamese and black-market goods to the South Vietnamese. With his profits he bought real estate in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York.”

“And Sydney,” Krupatin reminded her. “Yes, and Sydney.”

The wine steward arrived, and she stopped while he served them, arranged the ice bucket, and left.

“With these large real estate acquisitions, he began to see the advantages of distancing himself from the operations of the drug trade. He hired shrewd subordinates and won their loyalty with lavish salaries. He established legitimate corporations in Hong Kong as fronts and created shell companies to launder his own money. Then, in a big leap, he began laundering for the yakuza and triads.”

“At …”

“Twenty percent.”

Krupatin nodded and grinned. “That son of a bitch was getting that kind of money even back then.” “He’s still doing it for them.”

“Yeah, but at
twenty-seven
percent now. He says it’s getting harder to do, with all the new international laws, with countries trying to cooperate. He told me that himself. Bullshit.”

“Anyway,” Irina continued, “his legitimate business ventures in Hong Kong grew enormously. Now, for the past two years, he has been busy trying to get them out before the Chinese take over in 1997. He has moved them primarily to Canada and the United States … one in France.”

She stopped and watched Krupatin refill her wineglass and then his own. He looked at her breasts through the smoky chiffon, the way he had done when she first met him and he had enjoyed the seduction game. She felt nothing. He might as well have been staring at her purse. He had fallen to his death long ago, and in doing so he had grasped at her heart in an effort to save himself. The plunge had killed them both.

“In the United States,” she said, “he has outgrown his Cosa Nostra ties and is expanding outside the Asian community. He is laundering drug money there, too. Counterfeiting. Prostitution. Gambling. And, of course, smuggling Asian aliens into the country—he made almost one billion from that in 1995. And heroin, as always. Also, for a percentage, he is facilitating Hong Kong capital flight to the U.S. The total flight money in 1994, the last year for which you have solid figures, was nearly six billion dollars.”

“Very good, Irina.” Krupatin sipped his wine, a happy glint in his eyes. “Now what about his personal life?”

She drank from her glass. The wine was very expensive, very smooth and clean.

“He married a Hong Kong Chinese,” she said, “a woman from a family well established in the colony’s social elite. From the time he was a young man he has had mistresses. His wife knows this. He has never had an Asian mistress. They are always American or British or European. Well, there was an Israeli girl once, and an Argentine. With these women he often enjoys a ménage à trois—in fact, more often than not.”

Krupatin shook his head in amusement.

“The grass is always greener, huh?” He laughed. “You can be the richest shit in Asia, but all the money in the world can’t buy you even one tiny blond Asian pussy. They just don’t make them that way.” He laughed again, enjoying very much this observation of Asian genetics.

“He is a long-time collector of ancient Asian art but in the last few years has turned his attention to East European religious icons and relics.”

“That’s
absolutely providential,” Krupatin said, smacking his lips. “I thought you would like that, huh? The fact is, some months ago I acquired a pair of very high-quality Macedonian icons for him. He has requested more, which we are going to get.”

“Three of his mistresses came to bad ends,” she went on,
“after having been dismissed by him. One died of a heroin overdose in Paris. Another died in a boating accident on Lake Como. A third died in a helicopter crash on Corsica.”

“And there were rumors …” Krupatin coaxed.

“Yes, rumors that they had been indiscreet about his sexual proclivities.”

“Which are …”

“Various things,” she said, refusing to indulge him. “He has an exotic imagination.”

Krupatin leaned back in his chair and laughed, softly, deeply, as much at her refusal to give him details—which he already knew anyway—as at Wei’s weaknesses. Krupatin always thought other people’s weaknesses were humorous.

The majordomo brought their menus; the headwaiter took their order. Krupatin scanned the mirror for signs that they were still being admired. He seemed satisfied and preened.

They talked more about Wei. Krupatin quizzed her through the cold hors d’oeuvres to make sure she had retained the details. He quizzed her through the soups. By the time their entrees arrived, they had finished with the Chinese.

“Now, Carlo Bontate,” Krupatin said.

“A third-generation Sicilian Mafia son from Palermo,” she began, reciting Krupatin’s expensively acquired information as if it were the Underground timetable. “Responsible for introducing his family to the new realities of modern drug commerce. Very helpful to the Colombians as a distributor of their cocaine in Europe, where the Sicilians already had the connections that the Colombians found hard to establish. Bontate’s family launders for the Colombians also, and that’s when you got involved with them, helping them by providing rubles. They also hit for the Colombians. From us they have established an arms connection, which they market to Western Europe and to the Colombians. Of course, they are involved in the traditional Mafia business in southern Italy.

“Now, apparently, Bontate has visions of establishing more serious operations in the United States, like those of some of the other Sicilian families who are already there. His influence there is growing, and la Cosa Nostra has been severely weakened by recent law enforcement successes. Now the Sicilian presence is probably bigger in the United States than that of la Cosa Nostra itself. Bontate has ambitions.”

“Personal life.”

“He has few interests besides the Mafia and his family. He married the daughter of a capo in an affiliate family and has three children. He also has mistresses, but they are Italian, regional women whose backgrounds are familiar to him. He is not a socially sophisticated man, but he is clever. Of the younger generation of Sicilians, he is the acknowledged man of influence that everyone else has to contend with.”

Krupatin had been eating all this time, nodding approval as he listened. He wiped his mouth as he finished chewing and picked up his glass.

“His American ambitions are the most important thing to him right now,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they are the most important thing to all three of us right now.” He drank his wine, looking at her as he washed his mouth with it and swallowed. “Wei, Bontate, and I have worked together, have been useful to each other in Europe. We all have a foothold in, the United States, but in different areas of influence. We all want more than a foothold, and none of us wants to wait too long to get it. We think we can be mutually helpful. We’re going to talk about it.”

Irina had taken advantage of his remarks to eat a few bites of her venison fillet. A few bites was all she cared for; her appetite had vanished. As Krupatin continued, she turned back to her wine and stole glances around the softly glowing dining room. Krupatin could not be ignored easily, but she caught the attention—for an instant—of a few men, of a woman, people who had no idea what they were seeing when their glance met hers in the thin margins of this London evening.

Krupatin undressed her slowly, peeling away the tight sleeves and bodice of black smoke until she was naked in front of him like an essence of his imagination, something pure though entirely barren of purity. She had never completely understood why he felt such a need to humiliate her. Perhaps it was shame, an emotion of which she did not believe him capable, though she could think of no other explanation. Shame over the way he used her—not sexually, that was the least of it, but as though she were soulless, an android from a future that had not yet arrived. So the way he treated her, in the context of the
present time, was not yet allowed; it was blasphemy, and it haunted him, and he hated her for it.

There was only one thing of integrity between them, and that one thing lived in the locket that hung around Irina’s neck and swung on the chain in the air between them. He dealt with her body however he wanted; that was her stoic concession, her part of their unspoken collusion. But he never touched the locket, and Irina never took her eyes away from it, glittering, spinning between them. Set in motion by malevolence, it was the only thing of light between their two dark-nesses, a kind of
sacramentum
in the abyss, a promise that the darkness was not forever.

L
EO
O
METOV HAD REMAINED SILENT THROUGHOUT THE FIRST
part of Gate’s briefing. He slumped uncomfortably in his metal chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs in a languorous manner that would have appeared restless if it had not been done with such sluggish indifference. He seemed preoccupied, only half attentive to Erika Jaeger’s account of the rising influence of Russian organized crime in Germany. Much of the time he was turned sideways in his chair, staring out the glass wall at the tropical courtyard, his elbow on the back of the chair, his chin in his cupped hand.

But when Curtis Hain began talking about Krupatin, Ometov regained interest in what was being said. He was especially attentive when Hain began talking about using female surveillants and penetrating Krupatin’s circle.

“Yes,” he interrupted, “yes, yes. This is extremely important.” He looked at Hain. “I am sorry, please, but it is so important for her to understand Sergei’s personality. This is so essential. In fact, it is the most important element in what we want to do.”

He had straightened up in his chair and was leaning forward as Jaeger had done. Cate noted that Ometov had apparently learned his English in Britain. The resulting accent was crisp but peculiarly nuanced.

“Mrs. Cuevas,” he said, putting stress on the last syllable of her name. “Cate. Sergei Krupatin is a complex man.” He glanced at Hain, not so much to seek permission to speak as to let him know he was going to say what he wanted to say. “It is important for you to know,” he went on, “that he is a Chechen. You know all about Chechnya from your news, I’m sure. All about the war. What you may not know is that for centuries the Chechens, being in a remote region, have created a kind of closed society. They are a law unto themselves, both psychologically and as a matter of practicality. They are an isolated and secretive people. Chechnya has been the spawning ground for Russia’s most vicious criminals for generations, much in the same way Sicily has been for the Italian Mafia. In the post-Communist era the Chechens have become the worst of the worst.

“Today they are the most violent of all of Russia’s gangsters, killing readily and indiscriminately. It is their first response to any challenge, their first solution to any problem. Chechen criminal organizations are especially strong in Moscow, but for a number of years now they have been a ruthless presence in all the major cities of Western Europe. They like to travel—they are not provincial peasants.”

Ometov seemed to be a man given more to thinking his way through to solutions than to acting, but he had an air of savvy about him that made Cate suspect he once had been an agent himself, though he had long ago gravitated to the cerebral end of operations.

“Sergei grew up in a smuggling family,” he went on, clearly immersed in Krupatin history, “and by the time he was a teenager he was in charge of his own gang, bringing cigarettes and whiskey across the Black Sea from northern Turkey into Georgia. He quickly graduated to gun-running and heroin. When he was eighteen, he was with his father and three of his brothers and some cousins when they were cornered by a Soviet coastal patrol on the Russian coast of the Black Sea. They were smuggling Turkish arms to rebels in southern Russia through ports in the Crimea. But they were betrayed by some of their own people. The father and oldest brother were captured, and while Sergei and the others watched from their hiding places in the rocky cliffs above the beach, those two were tortured by the militia. They were dragged naked up and down the beach behind a jeep while the soldiers used them for
bayonet practice, jabbing at them until they were in shreds, falling to pieces. Then they were left there on the sand. Sergei and his other two brothers could not fire on the patrol for fear of giving away their positions. They watched in silence.

“Afterward Sergei made it his personal business to discover who had betrayed them. It was a cousin. Sergei made the man watch as his house was burned down and then while his wife and two daughters were gang-raped until they were dead. Then Sergei himself disemboweled the man with a shovel.

“A few years after this, Sergei moved to Moscow, where numerous Chechen gangs were already well established. But he did not go to work for one of these many gangs. Instead he did something that was to become a trademark of his operational style. Rather than start his own black-market scheme or set up his own protection racket, he took time to study the world in which these gangs operated. What was the hierarchy? Some gangs were more influential than others. Why? What rackets yielded the most income? Which were the best controlled? Which ones had the best connections with city politicians or influential party members? When he had satisfied himself regarding these questions, he and his men picked a ‘business’ they liked and simply took it over. It was a black-market food operation. Five men died quickly within eighteen hours, and Krupatin was established, literally overnight, as a major black marketeer.

“Within the next three years he did the same thing with a car theft ring, a prostitution ring, and a major protection racket. He used violence ambitiously, precisely, and without hesitation. Once he focused on a business, there was no denying him.”

Ometov paused, seemingly to decide how best to proceed. His pale gray eyes, which had been so much a part of his quick smile earlier, had grown calm and thoughtful. He seemed more tired than the others.

“By the early 1980s,” he continued, “Sergei had become a very rich man. But he was still a thief among thieves, and he wanted that to change. He decided to pay huge bribes to several officials in the central ministry in order to obtain import licenses, which were very difficult to acquire. This he did. At this time the Soviet Union was flush with profits from its oil exports. The embargo had driven world oil prices to thirty-five
dollars a barrel, and the Soviet Union, because we had vast oil reserves, was collecting windfall profits. But the rest of the country’s infrastructure was in shambles—our factories were outdated and falling apart, our agricultural programs were unproductive, nothing worked. Virtually every kind of consumer item imaginable had to be imported. So Krupatin became a major importer with a government license, liberally bribing officials to back up his counterfeit bills of lading. He bought at low world-market prices, everything from shiploads of wheat to railcars full of porcelain toilets, and sold to the central government at inflated prices, always paying off party officials whenever he had to. He could afford it. From 1982 to 1985 he made staggering profits and began opening bank accounts all over Europe.

“Because of his established government connections, he was standing in the doorway of opportunity when perestroika walked through, the beginning of the golden age of organized crime in Russia.” Ometov sat back and crossed his arms thoughtfully, shaking his head.

“Free market economy. Well, Gorbachev, he was desperate. Everything was collapsing around him, poor bastard. The only people who had money to invest in these ‘free enterprises’ were the party barons, who had spent their careers siphoning money from the government, and the gangsters, whose black-market economy was in fact the real economy that kept Soviet society from imploding. So who do you suppose put their money into this new ‘private commerce’?” He nodded wearily. “Black and gray money flooded into joint ventures with Western entrepreneurs, it flooded into the stock exchanges, into cooperatives and banks and joint stock companies. During the six years of perestroika, Krupatin became a criminal giant. And he was not the only one.”

Ometov sighed hugely and stood up. He put his hands into his pockets and walked over to the glass wall. He stared out a moment, his sloping shoulders the very caricature of weariness. He turned around.

“In August 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. Fifteen new nations emerged, and the criminals really went to work. Russia was like a helpless woman being gang-raped by her own children. There was an immediate hemorrhage of Russia’s natural resources, tons and tons every day, day in and day out—aluminum, petroleum, cobalt, nickel, steel, timber,
cesium, uranium, titanium, silver, tin, and on and on and on. The independent republics—the former Soviet Union—plundered the country with the help of the
mafiya
, which had the money and the connections to obtain the material.

“And armaments. My God. Every crooked general who had any control over a military installation of any kind used its armory as his personal property—and sold it to the
mafiya.
Tanks, missiles, planes, automatic weapons, mortars … you can imagine. And who did the
mafiya
sell these weapons to? Everyone! Criminals, terrorists, drug traffickers, military establishments. Warring Third World armies.

“Our little Sergei was right in the middle of this. Money poured into his pockets. With these profits he entered the international drug trade on a scale that dwarfed his former efforts. Now that Russia’s borders were porous, he used them as transshipment avenues. He made contact with the Sicilians; he knew they were trafficking cocaine for the Colombians, who had no distribution network of their own in Europe. He offered his import companies as venues. It began to snow the year round in Europe. European consumption of cocaine jumped to two hundred tons annually—ten billion dollars’ worth on the streets. Krupatin’s drug profits quickly quadrupled.”

Ometov paused, pursed his mouth, and thought a moment. “Sergei traveled. He followed his money like a rat follows garbage, and he followed his businesses, which were now thoroughly established in Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Britain, and the United States. His Chechen thugs were raising the crime rate in every country, laundering money, dealing drugs and weapons and stolen antiques and stolen cars, extorting, blackmailing, running protection rackets. It was a Russian holiday.

“Krupatin himself was long out of the day-to-day operations of all this, however. Today he simply travels from one major city to another, touching base with his lieutenants to make sure everything is running smoothly. If it isn’t, people die.”

“Okay, I have a question,” Erika broke in. She had followed Ometov closely, and now she sat with her legs crossed, ankle on knee, leaning back, her hand open and cocked to stop Ometov. “How much do you know about Krupatin’s assassins?”

Ometov gave her a wry grin. “How much do I know?”

“Yes. The biggest problem for law enforcement in the European Community is—”

“Sharing intelligence. No one wants to share intelligence,” Ometov said with a weary nod.

“Exactly.” Erika closed her hand into a fist. “In the EC we have twelve different governments with twelve different political philosophies and twelve different legal systems. But police agencies are the same everywhere—they don’t trust anyone else with their intelligence. So these people, Krupatin’s people, can kill in one country, drive a hundred miles and kill in another country, catch an hour’s flight and kill in yet another country, and as far as the law enforcement agencies know, it is as if three different guys did three different hits. There’s no way to build a file on these people. Krupatin’s enforcers essentially have a free hand, because nobody’s keeping a running record from country to country.”

Ometov, who was leaning on the sliding glass doors and looking out at the courtyard beyond, had turned sideways to listen to her. He said, “You have a lot of palms here. I like palms. Very tropical.”

“The question is,” Erika said, throwing a look of exasperation at Hain, “who are Krupatin’s hitters? We know he has used his close Chechen friends. We killed two of them in Berlin six months ago, after they hit three Dutch traffickers. But does he use only Chechens? How does he set them up? How do they operate?”

Ometov looked down, seemed to study his feet, and then turned to the others again.

“Initially, of course, they were his Chechen associates. Thugs.” He shook his head. “Just thugs. There was very little need for finesse.”

“Initially,” Erika said.

“Yes. As time passed, as his organization became more sophisticated and his targets were men of greater importance, it was essential that the killings be conducted more … surgically. He began using active KGB agents who took assignments from him off the record. Of course, after the fall of communism there was no shortage of these men. There was no trouble moving across borders. Sergei has always had superb forgers. Documents are no problem.”

“The KGB agents are not so hard for us,” Erika said.
“Our foreign intelligence from the cold war years is good there. But they are not the only hitters.”

“No, you’re right,” Ometov confirmed. “Often in other countries he uses ‘disposables,’ people who are hired to do the actual work and who are killed themselves when they return home—wherever that might be.” He paused. “And then there are a few ‘surgeons’—Krupatin’s specialty. These are the top assassins. They are usually highly educated people, professionals who are not from Krupatin’s world but who have had the bad luck somehow to cross his path. These people usually have access to someone special, someone who would otherwise be nearly impossible to get to without attracting sensational attention. But the surgeon has no problem, because he is one of them. He is a banker. An executive. A bureaucrat. A lawyer. Krupatin’s theory is, if you want to kill a politician, get a politician to do it. If you want to kill a stockbroker, get another stockbroker to do it. Because they are on the inside, they know how to do it without disturbance. And because they have no motive, they are never suspects.”