The Con Man's Daughter (16 page)

Chapter 17

Thursday

4:30 P.M.

The two women in Jimmy's Bistro were already on then-second bottle of wine when Eddie left. He drove like a madman, speeding back over the Verrazano to Brooklyn, late for his meeting with Boland. Weaving in and out of traffic on the Belt Parkway, he started to call Babsie, but he put the phone back down because he didn't want to start depending on that. Breathe, he told himself, just keep breathing. Wait for the opening. Sooner or later, they always give you an opening.

Matty Boland was dressed to impress-a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a burgundy tie with small polka dots. He didn't seem to notice that Eddie was late. All he wanted to talk about were the events of the previous night, and the severed head.

"You piss ice water, man," Matty Boland said. "No way would I have had the balls to look inside that bag. Just the idea it might be your daughter…"

They took the Lincoln Town Car, heading toward JFK. The traffic to the airport seemed unusually light. As they passed the entrance to Marine Park, Eddie thought about the shooting fourteen years earlier. In moments like last night, or that shooting, he seemed to be able to stand outside himself, a spectator to the slow-motion chaos around him. In the ring, it had been the same thing; there were times when he couldn't even hear the crowd, or feel his own body, and all that existed was the enemy before him. In Marine Park all those years ago, he and Paulie Caruso had walked shoulder-to-shoulder into a barrage of gunfire, calmly killing two local punks who'd just committed a double murder.

"That shit takes a piece out of you," Boland said, shivering. "If you want to talk about last night, I can listen. That's what I'm trying to say."

"Just take care of them," Eddie said. "I'll be fine."

For the first time in his adult life, Eddie had asked for help. He couldn't let anything else happen to Grace. He'd called Boland and offered to do whatever he could to help them nail Borodenko, providing the feds protected his family twenty-four hours a day. They even worked a deal with the Yonkers PD to have a policewoman assigned full-time to stay with Grace.

"Sick guy, this Russian bastard," Boland said.

"You have no idea, Matty. There's a story floating around Brighton Beach that Yuri Borodenko caught someone listening in on a private conversation. He cut the guy's ears off and made him eat them."

At JFK, Boland tinned his way past the security people and drove right onto the tarmac. He parked on an angle, facing a red-white-and-blue Boeing 767. Fifty yards away, workers tossed luggage onto the conveyor. Eddie watched the crew preparing the plane, trying to figure out why he was here. Boland had gone through a lot of trouble just to park near the belly of a departing jumbo jet.

"So who belongs to this head?" Boland asked, adjusting his seat backward and stretching out. "Somebody's gotta be missing it by now."

"You'd think," Eddie said. "Babsie Panko canvassed the hospitals, morgues, and the cemeteries in the metropolitan area. Some of the older, filled up cemeteries have no phone numbers. She has all the local police departments checking their jurisdictions."

"You didn't recognize it," Boland said.

"I didn't look that close. It appeared to be male. Very little hair. Babsie Panko says it's elderly. The face was dark, very swollen and distorted. My guess is that he'd been dead over a week."

"Just a spare head somebody had sitting around?"

"Or dug up for the occasion."

It might not even be Borodenko's people this time, Eddie thought. It could have been any one of the people he'd humiliated in the Samovar yesterday. Or any old acquaintance pissed off and sick enough to dig up a human head and throw it at his door. When this was all over, when Kate was safely home, maybe they'd laugh about it. Some of his old cop pals would have made it a drinking event. Eddie Dunne's annual skull toss. Closest to the door wins.

"Everybody in the task force has Sergei Zhukov's picture," Boland said. "We're going to find him soon."

"I figured he was flying out today and that's why we came here."

"No, Sergei's not flying anywhere. We have a hold on his passport. If he goes, he's swimming."

"Borodenko flying in?"

Boland shook his head no. Lights began popping on in the gloomy afternoon. Activity around the plane quickened. A steady stream of luggage and boxes flowed up the conveyor belt.

"Okay, I give up," Eddie said. "What the hell are we doing here?"

"Watching the money plane."

It was almost 5:00 p.m. when a cream-colored armored car pulled up. Two armed guards joined the baggage handlers and began putting large white canvas bags on the conveyor belt. Seconds later, another armored car pulled up.

"You wanted me to see guys loading money bags," Eddie said.

"The powers downtown want you to understand what we're up against."

"Like I don't?" Eddie said. What he did understand was the reason for Boland's power suit. The city detective trying to impress him with the invincibility of the almighty federal government.

Boland said, "Downtown says all you talk about is minor schemes. They think you underplay it. They want you to be aware that these guys are more than a handful of local grifters. If they're going to make a big investment in you, they want you to understand exactly how dangerous this situation really is."

"Okay, so you showed me the money plane," Eddie said. "And where is all this cash going?"

"Nonstop to Moscow. The guards are loading twenty-three hundred pounds of crisp, brand-new American one-hundred-dollar bills. Just off the printing press. Over one hundred million dollars on this flight. And this goes on at least once a week."

"A hundred million," Eddie said. "Apparently, it's not federal aid going to the Russian government. We wouldn't be here if it were that simple."

"It's mob money," Boland said. "Stacks of fresh hundreds going into various Russian banks either controlled by or directly owned by Russian organized crime. A hundred mil, still in the Federal Reserve wrapper. Brand-new and already going through the laundry. You can almost smell the soapsuds."

"And they want our money because the ruble buys shit."

"They need dollars to operate worldwide, Eddie. The Russian
mafiya
now owns over eighty percent of the banks in Russia. Over two thousand new banks in just a few years. Most of them way undercapitalized. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, whatever state control there was evaporated. No rules, no regulations. Convicted felons own banks over there. They're using these banks to launder an incredible amount of illegal money."

"Why rob a bank when you can own one?"

"Exactly," Boland said. "Criminals everywhere are getting in on this. Now the Russians have brought the Colombians on board. They're well on their way to being the World Bank for illegal drugs."

"All right," Eddie said. "This money we're looking at now starts out as street money, right? From the sale of drugs or guns, I assume. How does it wind up here, in this plane, as brand-new money?"

Boland gave Eddie a quick lesson in the rules of money laundering: First, ownership must be concealed. Second, the money must change form; three million dollars in twenties cannot come back as three million in twenties. Third, the process must be obscured-the whole point of money laundering is that the trail cannot be followed; and fourth, control must be maintained.

"It's all done through bank transfers," Eddie said. "I know that much from Lukin."

"Almost always," Boland said. "Let's say Borodenko acquires an amount of dirty money. From the sale of any contraband. Like you said, drugs, guns, stolen oil, gasoline, bombs, anything. Say fifty million dollars. They wire the dirty fifty million through several front companies and eventually into a London Eurodollar account. Then a Russian mob-controlled bank orders fifty million in one-hundred-dollar bills from a New York bank. Simultaneously, the London bank wires the fifty million, plus commission, to the same New York bank. That bank then buys fifty million in uncirculated hundreds from the U.S. Treasury. They load it on this flight and it goes directly to the Russian bank."

"Investigate our banks," Eddie said. "We have control over our own banks."

"Been there, done that. They're operating legally."

"Monitor overseas wire transfers."

"Sounds easy, but there are over seven hundred thousand of them daily."

"Well, I told you they were smart," Eddie said. "Lukin always said the worst thing that happened to the United States was the breakup of the Soviet Union."

"That's the problem," Boland said. "It allowed these people to travel the world freely. The KGB already had spy networks set up throughout the world. When the Soviet Union fell apart, those networks almost instantly morphed into ones run by organized crime. The world was their oyster."

"Borodenko had KGB connections."

"And that spells organization. This is where it gets worse. I know you don't like to use that word, but this is spread out all over the world. We have information they are trying to pull Mideastern terrorist organizations into the fold. This money you see here being loaded on this plane might be cash flow to buy Russian nuclear, chemical, or biological weaponry. And that means any Saddam wanna-be who can scare up enough oil cash is in the game. The potential/for harm here is enormous and frightening."

"One question: If this brand-new money comes directly from the Federal Reserve, why the hell is the government letting it go on?"

"A lot of this money will never come back here. It costs our government only four cents to make one of these hundreds. For every hundred-dollar bill that disappears into the black hole of the Third World, the government makes ninety-nine dollars and ninety-six cents. That adds up fast."

"Okay," Eddie said. "I'm softened up, ready for the kill."

"Obviously, we have to take Borodenko down. We need a serious informant, someone with firsthand knowledge about Borodenko's operation. We want to put bugs in as many locations as possible. I know you tried to hand us Lexy Petrov, but my bosses don't think all those little scams are enough to make him cooperate. They figure you got someone else in your pocket."

"Will this court order cover Kate's kidnapping?"

"Eddie, we need your commitment, no matter what."

"You didn't answer my question. Will the court order cover the kidnapping?"

"I'll do all I can to get it added. If not, I'll get the word out informally. The more bugs we get in, the better the chances we hear something about Kate or Sergei. As soon as anything is said that even hints of the kidnapping, we'll amend the warrant immediately. If one word about her is uttered, we'll be all over it."

"We're talking about right now. Not six weeks from now."

"Soon as I can get the affidavit typed up."

"Drive me back to my car," Eddie said.

On the way back to Brooklyn, Eddie again gave them Lexy Petrov, his old friend and bartender. He told Boland he had a tape recording of a drunken Lexy confessing to the murder of Evesi Volshin. Volshin was still alive on the floor of the Samovar when Lexy walked over and beat his skull with a lead pipe. Some nights, in a vodka haze, Lexy liked to brag about killing Volshin. He'd reach under the bar and pull out a lead pipe, then show the bits of Evesi's blood and hair embedded in the black electrical tape that wrapped around the pipe. This pipe was now in Eddie's trunk.

"Lexy knows everything," Eddie said. "And he'll roll over."

"We'll pick him up tonight," Boland said as his cell phone rang.

Screw Lexy, Eddie thought. He'd given him the chance to show his friendship yesterday. Maybe he didn't know about Kate, but Eddie had no doubt he knew something about Sergei. Eddie heard Boland say, "You're shit-tin' me!" He put the phone down, grinning and shaking his head.

"They identified the head they threw on your lawn," Boland said.

"Fast work."

"Extensive dental work made it easy," he said, still grinning in amazement. "The guy had top-notch recon-structive work by some famous dentist to the stars in Manhattan. Just a few years ago. Luckily, it stayed pretty much intact, considering all the trauma to his face. This guy took a hell of a beating before they sliced his head off."

"Anybody I should know?"

"Actually, yeah,",Boland said. "It's Paul Caruso, Eddie. Your ex-partner, Paulie the Priest."

Chapter 18

Thursday

8:00 P.M.

Dust rose from the dirt floor of the basement of the North End Tavern. The floor had been a dirt one since Kieran Dunne first bought the place in the 1950s. Kevin talked about pouring concrete but never got around to it. It didn't matter to Eddie, who spent more time down there than anyone else. He liked the dank, beery smell; it seemed to fit the raw sport he loved. The sweet science, although not sweet tonight. Viciously, he pounded away on the duct-taped heavy bag that hung from the ceiling's center beam, trying to exorcise all that haunted him. He punished the seventy-pound canvas bag, manhandling it as if it were a feather pillow.

"I remember the first time I saw you hit somebody," Babsie Panko said. She was sitting on an empty beer keg.

"Who did I hit?"

"My brother Gus. At my niece's christening. You were both drunk. Gus got mad and threw a punch. You hit him back. He fell and knocked over the pot of kielbasa. Daddy threw you both out."

Eddie barely remembered. He'd gotten drunk at a dozen

Panko christenings, weddings, or wakes. He'd usually gotten an early start because he helped Babsie's older brothers carry chairs they'd borrowed from the Brelesky Brothers funeral home. They'd carried two dozen folding chairs ten blocks, from the funeral parlor through the streets of Yonkers to their apartment above the butcher shop.

"That was the first time you danced with me," she said.

"Probably why Gus punched me."

"You were a senior, eighteen, I think. I was a freshman, just turned fourteen."

"No wonder he hit me," Eddie said.

Eddie shuffled, working with the bag's movement, throwing hooks when it swung side to side, straight punches when it swung toward him. He remembered Richie Costa breaking his wrist the first time he worked out on the heavy bag. The trick was to hit it with the front of your fist, no angles. Hit in the middle of its horizontal axis and it wouldn't spin.