The Code (18 page)

I could take it from here. Polo walked in my wake.

I opted for the nice-weather-isn't-it approach to conversation. “Does your father have any idea what your phone bill is going to be?” I shouted at the top of my voice over “Love the Way You Lie.”

Mays looked up slowly. It was late. He was tired, not sharp. So at first he showed puzzlement upon hearing someone speaking English. Then shock that someone was speaking to him in a room full of strangers. Then fear, that I shouldn't be there, knowing what I know. Too puzzled, then too shocked, and then too afraid to form a thought.

I coloured inside the lines for him. “I tried calling you,” I said. “I think some Russian lifted your phone.” My throat was already starting to hurt.

“I left it in the car charging,” he shouted back, “yesterday.”

“Not anymore. Some Russian broke in there and took it.

That's who answered when I called. Smash and grab.”

I didn't bother noting that his father was going to have no trouble covering a bill with hour-long charges to Moscow long distance. It wasn't the prospect of getting reamed out that had him out of rhythm. He wanted to go underground, but he was coming to the stark realization that he'd never be able to go unnoticed so long as he was pulling down a seven- or eight-figure cheque from the league.

“Nice little cultural exchange program you have going here,” I said.

“It's not what you think.”

“I'm not sure anymore what I think.”

“I came to get him.”

“I want to believe you,” I said. I looked over at the blonde who was now smiling at him. “You probably could be having more fun. Here, I mean.”

“Markov's in trouble. He knows it.”

“I dunno if they can fix it with the team. I think they'd probably have him back. They sure as hell could use him next season.”

“It's not the team. He didn't go because he was afraid that he was going to get arrested for killing the coach. He's been hiding out here with his girlfriend.”

That seemed a hell of a leap, but then again I'm not seventeen, Russian, and under the thumb of tyrants on two continents.

“This is his girlfriend?”

“Well, I guess she's
a
girlfriend. She took a camera-phone video of him and he came to get her to take it down off the internet so that his girlfriend back in Russia doesn't find it.”

I just let the video stuff drop. Too much information. The videographer in the club was a stunner, so I could imagine what the girl back home looked like.

“He didn't come home with me the night Coach and Doc McGarry were killed.”

“So you don't know where he was. And he walked out into the parking lot …”

“Just to pull my car around front of the arena. He told me before the game that he had to go to Toronto. He wanted me to drive him but I told him I had a test first thing in the morning. My father gave me my weekly spending money at the game and I gave it to Valery. A couple hundred bucks, maybe more. I told him I'd cover for him for a day but to get back.”

“He wouldn't have wanted to take Hanratty's Caddy, would he? He would have walked right by it.”

“I don't think Valery would steal a car, and nobody would take that old car. Everyone would know whose it was.”

Good point. It would be like stealing the clown car at the circus. All you need to make a getaway, everyone seeing the car and beeping horns and waving.

Young Mays kept on filling in the blanks.

“I told him the next day that Coach and Dr. McGarry had been killed and how it happened. He freaked out. He said they were going to arrest him. I tried to convince him to come back and just answer questions. He wouldn't do it. He's been hiding out with this girl ever since.”

The video. I had to ask.

“Why was he so worried about a girl in Russia seeing him in action on the computer screen?”

“She's coming over. In a couple of weeks. Markov went to these guys …”

I thought about all “these guys” I had seen in the last couple of hours. I tried to figure out which one had shipped Markov's girlfriend to Canada in a cargo container along with six crates of smokes, a couple of skids of Stoli, and enough AK-47s to outfit a working crew.

“… and they managed to get her a flight and a visa.”

“What about her?” I pointed to the girl on Markov's arm.

“She's a student.”

Sure, kid. She probably cracks her textbooks between sets in the change room at a strip joint.

“It's not that. She's older than Markov.”

I did the five-second visual inspection. She was.

“She was a nurse back in Kazakhstan. She's trying to get certified here. She's doing English classes and working part time. Markov's agent set it up.”

Plausible. If Markov's agent had enough clout to get him out of Russia, he had to know enough palms in need of grease to get this girl her letters of transit.

“So what the hell are you thinking?”

“I was going to get him to come back.”

“No, I mean what the hell are you thinking? You're standing
here like you're at a funeral and that blonde over there wants to have you over for breakfast. Buddy, if you're going to break curfew you at least have to get laid.”

“No, she's just a friend of Markov's girlfriend.”

That wouldn't be
the
girlfriend but rather
a
girlfriend.

“So are all those girls,” he said. “They all went to school with her and worked with her. Markov told them we're on the same team.”

The kid was a Boy Scout. An abundance of talent around him and he lacked the imagination to leave with anything more than a postcard and T-shirt. I envied and pitied him.

There was no use to trying to jump-start the kid. I turned to the girl and kept it businesslike so I didn't look like a dirty old man. I kept the language as basic as possible so it wouldn't get read the wrong way.

“He likes you,” I told her, nodding my head in Mays's direction.

“He's a nice boy,” she said. “I met him at work.”

She nursed a screwdriver as a prop and kept glancing in his direction, never catching his eye. He sighed. It just died there and she didn't get it. This kid who could have dined out on his celebrity was content to be a wallflower.

Polo and I left. I had to pull Polo by the arm. He walked west and leered east.

“If they're looking at you, they want you to pay or roll you or both.”

“It would be worth it,” he said.

P
OLO AGAIN
fell asleep in the cab ride back to the Merry Widow. His head again was pressed against the window. He was smiling.

I thought about Billy Mays Jr. Maybe rich kids and top prospects have to be more suspicious about girls who can sniff out money the way that French pigs can sniff out truffles. I probably
was a little too xenophobic in my thinking. Puck bunnies are puck bunnies no matter what country issued their passports. If these girls had gone to school and were legit and working and studying, then who was I to judge them so hard? And Markov's girl and the one eyeballing Mays were stunning.

I was going soft.

The next morning I got out of bed with a head that softly drummed a beat left over from the Russian club. I drank stale coffee out of a stained cup. I called Ollie Buckhold.

“It's not my business, but I'd see about getting your client's cellphone account shut down,” I said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“My guess is that there are several thousand dollars' worth of long-distance calls to the Russian underworld on Billy Mays's account.”

Puzzled silence. No sense keeping him dangling.

“I saw your client last night in a Russian club with the Markov kid. I just wanted to let you know that he's okay and that maybe you shouldn't call him unless you want to aggravate some sort of Alexei Capone type. Somehow your client's phone ended up in a Russian thug's pocket.”

“Where's Billy Jr.?”

“Right now, I don't know. I don't know if he slept in his own bed last night, but I suppose he slept alone.”

“What's your problem, asshole? What's all this cryptic shit you're hitting me with?”

“You might do a better job of protecting your client's interest if you kept tabs on him. Like knowing where he is.”

I was about to hit Buckhold with a line about Hanratty being right about him. But inevitably our team was going to have to do business with the agent and there was no sense piling up hard feelings. It was one of those rare times when reason and discretion got the better of me.

“He's all right? I got a call from the father asking if I'd talked to him. Billy had an appointment that he missed.”

“Yeah, he's all right. He's been trying to talk the Markov kid into going back to Peterborough. Markov thinks the cops like him for the Hanratty murder.”

“You're kidding.”

“You've forgotten what it's like to be seventeen, the son of a small-town factory worker, and eight time zones from home where you don't speak the language. A lot of North American kids have a problem with authority figures—they don't respect them. Markov's like a lot of the Russian kids—they're scared shitless of them. A cop wants to question Markov and he thinks he's in the express line to the gulag.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“It's a courtesy call. I want to talk to your client and to his father and to you and anybody else I think I need to do my workup. Quid pro quo. I'll help you protect your client, and you help me protect my job.”

We came to an understanding: I was going to get my meeting as soon as the kid was back in the pocket. I spat grounds into the sink.

D
ETECTIVE MADISON
sent me a message from his personal email account. He laid out the details of the fundraiser: a dinner at an Italian family restaurant. May Day. Vito's. I tried to figure out which of my two suits wouldn't clash with red velvet curtains.

I
MADE MY CALLS
to the guys on our scouting staff just to find out the latest rumours: Who was on thin ice besides us? If Hunts and I and others were going to get whizzed with the arrival of Tomlin and Anderson, I'd need a plan for a job search and another team with staff turnover would present an opportunity. None of the guys said that they'd heard anything out there. Then again, they might have but were just looking to cut me out.

I trusted Duke Avildsen for the clearest read of the situation, mine and ours. “Shadow, jobs on the line is things as they always have been, things as they always will be,” Duke said, like he was channelling a cross-legged guru on a mountaintop and David Byrne.

“Yeah, the old it goeth and it cometh, but I was holding out hope for stayeth,” I said.

“It's like our whole business,” he said, ignoring me. “All thinking ends up as over-thinking. Do what you have to, trust your instincts, and, if necessary, have a short memory.”

Yeah, on those terms life is a lot like the game. All thinking is just over-thinking half-defined.

I told Duke to give me a call any time for his words of wisdom. He could have provided the required daily minimum of spiritual reinforcement. I felt minutely better when I hung up the phone.

Seconds later a ring.

“Mr. Shade, this is Billy Mays Jr.”

“You're up early, son, or did that blonde keep you awake?”

“No, nothing like that. I think I convinced Markov to go back to Peterborough with me.”

“Your Russian must be really good if you could get that message across.”

“The girls helped me. He finally agreed when I told him that my father would get him the best lawyer if he needed it. Not that he will or anything.”

Yeah, I could see that. The kid's fear of authority was trumped by the new Russian system of belief: that there's nothing money can't buy your way into or out of.

“So when are we going to meet?”

“Well, I'm driving up to Peterborough this afternoon.”

I had to do a little relationship maintenance that day and night. Sandy was feeling ignored and with cause. I wanted to avoid three-plus hours in transit, and the Rusty Beemer was in need of a much-delayed oil change.

“Why don't we sit down and have lunch and I'll ask you a few questions. You don't want to sit at a table with Markov and his girl anyway.”

“Okay, let's meet at the Hermitage on Steeles just west of Yonge. I can be there at eleven. Markov's girl works around the corner. There's a Russian restaurant they like right there.”

I imagined another backroom poker game with the young lovers staring into each other's eyes. Or maybe she dealt cards there. No matter. Our meeting was set. We'd talk about a million-dollar investment and his future over blini.

B
ILLY MAYS
WAS ten minutes early. I was fifteen. He might have been at the appointed coffee shop earlier and left when he didn't see me. A double check mark beside punctuality. He was freshly pressed and had spent some time getting his blond hair neatly messy, the latest in bed-head fashion. A check mark
for not wearing a baseball cap turned backwards and flip-flops. Another: bottle of water rather than coffee or some sort of iced drink. Kid knew to stay hydrated.

Markov was in tow. Mays explained to Markov that he was going to lunch at 12:15. He told Markov to sit at another table while we talked. The Russian kid sat down with a large cup of black coffee, downed it in one chug, and didn't look up from his BlackBerry for more than an hour. He managed to hoover back two bagels in approximately two bites apiece.

Mays had a clear idea of who he was, what was lying out there for him, and what the stakes were for the team that called his name on the draft floor. He had a clear idea of the time it was going to take to sort out his game and the help he was going to need to get through life in L.A. with millions in his pocket at age eighteen.