Dirty Fire (11 page)

He turned to Gil.

“Look, try to think of it more as a kidnapping than a theft; the art thief’s leverage is that you either pay a ransom or he destroys the stuff. And he prices the ransom so that a buy-back is reasonable. It’s simple and more or less straightforward, and everybody wins but the cops.

“But in your case, if anything was stolen, there’s no owner left alive to buy it back. Even worse for the thief, a dead owner turns this into a murder—hell,
two
murders, right? That kicks everything up into another league altogether. No insurance company is going to make a deal in a murder case.”

Herndon paused. He picked up the fax of Cieloczki’s case notes.

“But that’s all kind of academic, isn’t it? See, from what it says here, there was no insurance taken out on
any
artwork.”

He selected one of the sheets and held it out for us to see. It was gray with neatly balanced lines of type that nearly filled the page. I recognized the letterhead of TransNational Mutual. The firefighter had pored over the lengthy breakdown the insurance company had provided on the coverages Levinstein carried on his home, business, cars, personal property.

Gil looked up at the FBI agent. Herndon’s own eyes looked back from under arched eyebrows, an expression that both mocked and encouraged.

“Am I speaking too fast here? We’re talking possibly millions of dollars of art, stolen from a guy that
this
says damn well knew to insure everything else he owned,” Herndon said, and for the first time Gil heard something different in the FBI agent’s voice. “Is it just me? Doesn’t that say something to the three of you?”

“You don’t think there was any artwork to begin with,” Bird said.

“Oh, no,” Herndon protested, in a patronizing tone that made Bird’s teeth grind. “We have to assume there was artwork, or this remains a motiveless crime—so I think there
was
artwork. I just don’t think there was any insurance issued on it.

“And that leads me to one of two possibilities. One, the guy didn’t take out any coverage, for whatever reason—say, he had bought it hot and knew it. But given the man’s lack of previous criminal record, I consider that a long shot. Two, there is no insurance—but your dead collector thought there was. That’s the only way a careful, apparently honest guy like this”—again, Herndon tapped on the sheet listing Levinstein’s coverages—“could sleep at night.”

He paused to let the implications sink in.

“And if that’s the case,” Herndon added, mildly for him, “don’t you people want to go home and look into exactly why he would think so?”

“Welcome to our own little United Nations,” said Phil Sozcka. “Mother Russia is just a few blocks ahead.”

He was sitting in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward with an arm draped over either edge of the front bucket seats where Terry Posson and I sat. On the car radio, the Cubs were dropping the second game of a doubleheader to St. Louis; it seemed an apt metaphor for the day so far.

Sozcka had taken off the curiously comical checkerboard-banded hat issued by the Chicago Police Department, and his razor-cut blond head was on a swivel from side to side as he cheerfully surveyed the bustle of unruly commerce and sidewalk diplomacy through which we were passing.

Sozcka was somewhere between his late 30s and mid-40s with an unlined open face and pale blue eyes. High on each cheek, a bloom of broken capillaries gave him a look of perpetual embarrassment. His hands were broad and blunt. If I looked hard enough, I could see a faint indentation around the third finger of his left hand.

I had linked up with Terry after the session at FBI headquarters in the South Loop. On our ride north along Lake Shore Drive she had been polite but terse, responding in monosyllables when I tried to make conversation. But she had not attempted to throw me out of her car, either; it was what I considered a distinct improvement in the relationship.

Inside the aged brownstone that served as the district police center, Phil Sozcka had been volunteered to us by his shift commander. The commander had accepted without comment that a material witness in an arson investigation was believed to be living in his district at an address on Devon Avenue.

He glanced briefly at the warrant, and examined Terry’s ID with only slightly more interest. But when he looked at my newly-issued card, his brow furrowed.

“Davey. Davey.” He studied my face, then looked at the card again. “You have any relatives on the job? Here in the city, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

He started to shrug. Then I saw a light come on behind his eyes, and his expression flattened. He checked his duty roster, suddenly all business. When he spoke, his voice was frosty and distant.

“There are no detectives available at the moment,
Mister
Davey,” he said, punching hard on the title. “But if your witness is hanging out up there with Russians, you’ll want somebody who’s a Russian speaker.” Then he had waved over the uniformed officer sitting at a desk on the far side of the squad room and spoke to him in low tones.

Phil Sozcka was the kind of cop Chicago had always bred. He was built solid, though wider at the bottom than at the top, and exquisitely schooled in the lore of the neighborhoods he patrolled. Now, as we motored along the busy avenue, Sozcka talked and Terry and I listened.

Chicago has always been a city of neighborhoods, making the metropolis a patchwork quilt of ethnicity. We were driving east down Devon, one of the places where, Sozcka noted, the seams of this quilt traditionally overlapped.

Over the years, Devon Avenue has always been a bellwether for the various waves of immigration that have flowed through the city. Particularly where it runs through the North Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park, its buildings and storefronts reflect the accents and attitudes of the more recent seasoning of the melting pot.

In the section immediately east of the Chicago River’s North Branch, the street has long featured a population that boasts the single largest concentration of Jews in the city.

But as you continue east, the influence of its more recent arrivals also makes Devon Avenue the place to purchase a sari or rent a videotape of New Delhi’s latest cinematic triumph. Around the corner from a Pakistani grocery are the offices of the Assyrian National Council. The Croatian Cultural Center draws strong participation from its share of the area’s residents, and what was until a few years ago the historic 1920s-era Temple Mizpah is now as well-attended as the Korean Presbyterian Church.

The latest addition to this multicultural mix is told in the windows of the groceries and doctor’s offices on Devon: the offerings for both supermarket specials and medical specialties advertise in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean—and, most recently, in Cyrillic script, disorienting in its dyslectic mix of recognizable and backward-facing letters.

For the Russians who live here, migration had mirrored the state of diplomacy as it had evolved between the two countries. A trickle that began in the late 1970s as part of the Cold War’s earliest thaw swelled into a steady stream during the détente of the ‘80s. The Soviet government, seeking to limit the potential embarrassment this modern exodus posed, issued passports listing their nationality as “Jewish” rather than “Russian.” It was a technicality not minded in the least by the majority of these eager emigrants, regardless of their actual religious affiliations. By the time the Berlin Wall became just another pile of rubble celebrating failed Soviet imperial aspirations, the rivulet had swollen to become a torrent of Russians.

Throughout the ‘90s, newly arriving Russians of all beliefs—or lack thereof—followed the linguistic and cultural path of least resistance that led to Devon. Each successive influx had brought along its own unique blend of hopes and paranoia, optimism and anxieties, expectation and experience. But Russia is an ancient country, a culture that has left certain indelible imprints in generations of its sons and daughters. Among the more pervasive of these, reinforced under both Czar and Commissar, was a certain mistrust of anyone who carried a badge. It was a skepticism born of often-bitter experience, as deep-seated as it was well deserved.

Sozcka, pleased at the opportunity to simultaneously escape his desk in the 8th District records room and to display his knowledge of local lore, kept up a running commentary as Terry inched around various traffic hazards. Cars and trucks—many of them dappled with rusty reminders of the recent winter’s road salt—lined the curbs like the levies of a river. Occasionally she edged around a truck, double-parked as strong-looking men in work clothes pulled boxes from open tailgates.

“In the last census, they counted like fifty thousand-plus native Russians living inside a quarter-mile radius of where we are right now,” Sozcka said. “There’s more now. Some of them are doctors, lawyers, engineers—or they were, in the old country.”

He thrust a thick finger at the windshield. “There’s a guy who works in that tearoom, over on the corner, who was a professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Kiev. Now he’s serving seed cakes and
petit-fours
to other émigrés while he learns English. You also have a lot of your first-generation, hard-working, babushka-wearing, green-card-carrying immigrant straight out of Minsk. Then you have kids who came here to avoid getting drafted into the Russian Army.”

“So you got all kinds,” Terry said, concentrating on the traffic.

“Good folk, most of ‘em,” Sozcka said. “But I’d be willing to bet a few of our new arrivals know what the inside of a Russian jail looks like. Not because they were political prisoners, either.”

“No kidding,” I said over my shoulder. “What kind of calls do you catch here?”

“You know how it is—the Commander said your father used to be a Chicago cop.” I twisted in my seat to look at Sozcka, hard; but his face was open and guileless and looked genuinely puzzled at the unexpected expression on my face.

After a moment, he resumed speaking.

“You have your better-off individuals living around the corner from people who are not too far off the poverty line,” Sozcka replied. “Nothing new about that in Chicago. We get our share of burglaries, purse snatching, the occasional mugging—the usual stuff, though the area tends more toward property crimes than violent ones. Weekends, we field some interesting drunk and disorderly beefs, the occasional domestic. Nothing all that out of the usual, really. The big concern these days is coming out of OCU.”

This time it was Terry who turned, her interest obvious. Chicago’s Organized Crime Unit was considered one of the best informed in the nation, and its concerns were seldom unfounded.

“They’re seeing signs that the Russian Mafiya is establishing itself pretty strongly among the émigré population,” Sozcka said. “That’s
M-A-F-I-Y-A
, no relation to our Sicilian friends. Except these Russians are following the same pattern the old Mustache Petes did when they were getting started way back when.”

His hand waved at the storefronts outside. “Past few years, they’ve been hitting up local businesses for protection, extorting money from illegal immigrants, all your garden-variety strong-arm stuff. But OCU says that now they’re moving heavy into the traditional big-ticket stuff—drugs, hookers, games—and even some pretty sophisticated computer fraud and shit.” Sozcka blushed, surprisingly. “Pardon
me
, miss.”

Terry winked at him in the mirror; the gesture only deepened the spots of color on Sozcka’s cheeks.

I rescued him. “We appreciate your help, Sozcka. How is it you speak the language?”

“My mother. Her people were ethnic Russians who lived in the western part of Estonia,” he said. “Most of the folks there spoke either Russian or German. Usually both—I guess so they could understand the words ‘hands up’ whenever they got invaded.”

Sozcka had a healthy laugh.

“She was a DP after the war, talked her way into a job with the U.S. Army as a translator. Then she married a Polish-American sergeant from Chicago—hey, where else?—and came back with him. He died when I was a kid, so it was just the two of us. When I was growing up, Ma was the only person on our block who spoke Rooski. I think she made me speak it at home just so she’d have somebody to talk to.”

He leaned forward and peered up through the windshield at a street sign. “It’s just up on the next block,” he said. “Now there’s seven Russian-language newspapers in the city and a radio station that broadcasts full-time in Russian. All the schools in the neighborhood have to have teacher’s aides who know Russian and the YMCA over on Pielmar Street has night classes that teach ESL—that’s ‘English as a Second Language’—for the new arrivals.”

Sozcka tapped Posson on the shoulder and pointed to a space being vacated by a rusting Buick. Terry pulled the car in expertly.

“I guess these days, Ma would have felt right at home,” said Sozcka, “except she didn’t particularly like Russians. Or Germans, for that matter. She never told me any of the details, but she had her reasons. Your address is just a little ways up—we can walk from here.”

The entryway was next to the Interbook, a Russian-language bookstore. Its expansive window displayed stacks of what looked like Russian paperback mysteries, computer textbooks in Russian and a wide range of Russian-English dictionaries.

A wooden door, with peeling strips of gray paint fringing the old brass of the doorknob, opened to a stairway leading upward. There were six mailboxes on the right wall, four of them with names printed in ink or pencil in the small recesses. None of them were the name of the man we sought.

“We’ll try a few doors and see if anybody’s home,” Sozcka said. He squinted up into the half light at the top of the stairs. “Sonnenberg, you said?”

“Sonnenberg,” Terry replied. “First name Paul. Nickname of Sonny.”

The first door was on the left-hand side of a corridor lit by a naked bulb. Traffic sounds rose muted up the stairway and the air smelled of scorched onions and the tang of hot metal. Somewhere on the floor, a television was on, tuned to what sounded like a child’s cartoon program. Automatically, Sozcka stepped out of the direct line in front of the doorway, and Posson moved to the right of it. The Chicago officer reached around and rapped loudly, shaking the door in its frame.

The door opened to a two-inch slit, and a balding man with a gray-flecked mustache looked out. His eyes flickered between Terry and Sozcka.

“Shto eta?”

“Dobriy dyen. Ya
Chicago Police,
”
Sozcka growled in a low voice, holding up the photo Terry had collected along with Sonnenberg’s rap sheet
. “Kto etat ‘Sonnenberg?’ On doma?”

“Nyet.”
The voice had a petulance tinged with suspicion that was evident despite the abruptness of the answer.
“A chyom vi gavareetye?
Chicago
balshoy gorat.”

Sozcka gestured down the corridor and said something in a tone between a question and a demand. It brought a swift reply.

“Nyet, eeh soo’kin sin nyet doma!”
What they could see of the man’s lip curled in annoyance.
“Ya nye ochyen lyooblyoo.”
The door slammed in the policeman’s face.

“Balshoye spaseeba,”
Sozcka said to the closed door, and despite the language barrier I could hear the sarcasm heavy in the policeman’s voice.

Sozcka turned to Terry.

“He says he doesn’t know any son of a—anybody by that name,” Sozcka said, his voice a stage whisper. “And he doesn’t know if his neighbors—who, incidentally, he, uh, doesn’t seem to think highly of—are home.

“Let’s keep trying. Our guy may have moved on, but let’s make sure.”

“Right,” said Sozcka. He stepped to the next door and lifted his hand to knock. But before he could, from inside the apartment we heard the sounds of a sudden scuffle, of a woman’s voice rising and cut short, punctuated with the sound of what might have been a hard slap against flesh. Then there was a crash, like a table loaded with glassware had collapsed.

Sozcka looked at me.

“Kick it,” I said. “Let’s go!”

Sozcka pulled his sidearm and sucked in a deep breath. On the far side of the door, Terry had her pistol out—a 9mm Beretta that looked too large for her hand—and I could see her tense in preparation.

“Police!” Sozcka bellowed, and the flat of his heavy shoe hit the door just below the knob. The jamb splintered and the door slammed against the wall, bouncing back on its hinges.

Before it could swing closed, the Chicago cop had shouldered past it, his chromed .357 revolver at arm’s length sweeping the room right to left. Terry was right behind him in a similar stance, her pistol moving in a left to right arc. “Everybody fuckin’
freeze
!” Sozcka screamed. “Freeze, goddamit!”