Authors: Brian Haig
“And what if you mess up and lose my money?”
“I’ll be on the bottom bunk. If I fail to keep my end of the bargain, you’re not obligated to keep yours.”
Bitchy crossed his arms and stared off at the far wall. Of the vast multitude of “investment advisors” at the pro draft who
pounced hungrily on the newest batch of twenty-two-year-old, undereducated millionaires, not one of those greedy blabbermouths
had offered a deal remotely resembling this. And if they lost it all through their own utter ineptitude, it was tough luck,
pal, sayonara.
Really, how many investment advisors promised outright that if they failed in their promises, they’d bend over and take it,
like they just gave it? “All right,” Bitchy said, hands back in his pockets.
“Another thing. I’m going to teach you how to do this. If I make you all that money, I don’t want you to turn around and lose
it afterward.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Only a little, Benny.”
Benny laughed.
“One last thing,” Alex said, returning to his book.
“Name it.”
“Spread the word. The last two prisons, we pooled our money and increased our buying positions enormously. The more the better
for you.”
The day that marked the anniversary of eleven months since the Konevitch trial, Kim Parrish threw her long-overdue fit.
The team of state prosecutors had arrived from Russia six months before, four of them in all, all men, all wearing blockish
suits made of a cheap, indescribable fabric. Only one spoke any semblance of English—just please, thank you, yes, but mostly
no, and a dismaying variety of filthy curses.
The FBI paid for the works and put them up in the downtown Hilton. They immediately raised hell about the lousy accommodations.
To shut them up, they were bounced a few blocks over to the Madison, a decidedly more upscale lodging. The complaints did
not abate until the Madison succumbed and switched them each to thousand-dollar suites.
They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the most expensive Georgetown restaurants, rented two Mercedes sedans, a snazzy black
Corvette, and a shiny red Maserati. They spent their five-day weekends raising hell in California and Florida, before they
fell deeply in love with Las Vegas and the legalized brothels nearby. They billed it all to the FBI—the first-class airfares,
the whores, the gambling losses that quickly turned mountainous. Everything was billed directly to the Feds. They drank from
dawn till dusk, got in fistfights in bars, picked up four DUIs, smashed up the Maserati, trashed one Mercedes sedan, and billed
all that, too, to the FBI.
They arrived with two dozen large crates stuffed to the lids with documents. Everything in Russian. Everything, every word
and comma, had to be meticulously and painfully translated into English.
Two more weeks were lost while Kim scoured the city for a competent translator. As the documents proved to be a thick maze
of Russian legalese, not any translator would do. Kim interviewed a dozen candidates. Several American college graduates whose
levels of fluency weren’t nearly as impressive as their résumés. Five Russian émigrés who utterly failed the English test.
A retired book editor who had translated two complete Tolstoy novels had seemed like her best bet. That one took a brief glance
at the two dozen crates and bolted.
Eventually, Kim drove across to the river to the leafy, sprawling CIA headquarters at Langley. She had called ahead and was
met by man from the Russian analysis section. Downstairs, in the large marble lobby, she briefly described her problem. Mr.
Spook smiled reassuringly and claimed he knew the perfect guy. On a sheet of paper he wrote the name and number of a Russian
expat, a man named Petri Arbatov, a major in the KGB before he defected to the U.S. Petri had a law degree from Moscow University
and in the fifteen years since his defection, he had also picked up an American JD from Catholic University. Petri demanded
$600 an hour, a price that would’ve impressed the most expensive firm in New York. He insisted he wouldn’t translate “da”
to “yes” for a penny less. The price was outrageous, far beyond what she had intended to pay. She promptly agreed.
What the hell: Petri, too, could send his rather impressive bills to the FBI. If the Fibbies could blow through all that dough
on a bunch of Russian cowboys whooping it up like rich Arab playboys, they better not even blink about all-too-legitimate
legal expenses.
Kim rented a small, furnished fourth-floor apartment on Connecticut Avenue, they hauled up the boxes, rolled up their sleeves,
and dug in. Petri proved to be a rare combination, an unemotional perfectionist—a short, thin, sad-faced man of few words
who concentrated deeply and absolutely on his work. He consumed only one meal a day, always a thin broth he brought from home
that he carefully spooned into his mouth. On such little nourishment, it was a miracle he stayed alive, much less endured
the backbreaking load of work. He surrounded himself with both Russian and English dictionaries and waded through each document,
word for word. He dictated. Kim typed. At six hundred an hour, he and Kim avoided expensive banter. They made it through three-quarters
of the crates at a furious pace because they wasted nothing: neither time nor words. After four months and twenty days of
eighteen hours each, she had no idea whether Petri was married, had cancer, children, was rich or poor, or even whether he
lived on the street.
Thus she was hugely surprised when he slammed down one of the documents and turned to her. “You and I need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Do you know what I did for the KGB, Kim? You’ve never asked.”
“You were a lawyer?”
“More or less. I was the KGB’s idea of a lawyer.”
“Okay. What does that mean?”
“I worked in a legal section that specialized in what were termed special cases.”
“So what? Specialization is the name of the game. I specialize in immigration law.”
“Ask my specialty.”
She decided to humor him. She smiled. “What was your specialty, Petri?”
“Framing. I framed people, Kim.” He let that nauseating confession sit for a moment, then pushed on. “Only high-value targets.
And I was the best, Kim, a remarkably talented lawyer. I could build a seamless case against anybody. A general secretary,
a highly decorated marshal of the Soviet Union, a poet with a Nobel Prize, it didn’t matter. Literally anybody, Kim. They
gave me a name and I went to work. When I was done, any jury or judge would believe the accused was a capitalist pig with
ten million in a Swiss account who had sex with his own children and lived only to destroy the motherland.”
“Is this why you defected, Petri? Conscience.”
He looked away. “Oh, I wish I could say yes.” He seemed to sink in his chair. “I’m not so noble, I’m afraid.”
“What happened?”
“One day, I went to visit another man in my section, a good friend of twenty years, who worked only three doors down from
my office. He had slipped out to go to the latrine. He did something incredibly stupid, he left his door unlocked. This was
totally against procedure, you must understand. Inexcusably sloppy. So I walked in. Documents were strewn everywhere. On his
desk, his floor, everywhere. He was obviously well along.”
“With what?”
“With me, Kim. He was building a case against me.”
She moved closer, almost in his face. “Why?”
He refused to look at her. “An hour later, I was hugging a CIA man from your embassy and begging for help. I cried, Kim. I
promised anything his bosses wanted—anything. I was about to get what I had done to so many others, and I was suffocating
with fear. No level of betrayal was ruled out. They whisked me out the next morning.” In a sad, resigned tone Petri added,
“So I never asked my old friend, you see.”
“You must have some idea.”
“Competition, I suppose. You see, I
was
the best, Kim. I could turn a saint into a whore, a pope into a pimp, whatever I wanted them to be. The chief-of-section
job was coming open. We were both vying for the job and all that came with it. A larger apartment, a chauffeured car, two
weeks a year in a seedy KGB guest-house in Ukraine. That’s how KGB people operate.”
“I see.”
He rolled forward in his chair and planted his skinny elbows on his bony knees. “Don’t look down your nose at my work. You
have no idea the expertise or artistry it requires. Everything must be perfect, Kim. Documents forged with just the right
dates, matching fonts, identical signatures, all the witnesses coached and carefully choreographed. It’s police work and lawyer
work and theater work rolled into one. You have to imagine the crime, Kim, dream it up out of thin air. Then dig a moat and
build a castle nobody can assail. No detail can be overlooked, no knot untied. I must tell you, Kim, it’s so much more difficult
than constructing a real case with real facts.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”
Petri lifted the document and began reading it again. He floated out of his past, back to the present. Nearly an hour passed
before he looked up and asked casually, “How do you consider this case against Konevitch?”
“You know what?” She put aside the document she was reading and glanced over at him. “I’m impressed. I thought those four
clowns were just drunken miscreants. Totally useless.”
“But now?”
“Well, I was wrong. They’re good. Very, very good. They’ve really delivered the goods.”
“Will your judge be persuaded?”
Kim smiled. “The Konevitches will be back in Moscow faster than they can blink.” After a moment, she asked, “What do you think?”
“Probably so.”
“I just wish I had all this material at the first trial.”
Petri nodded as if to say: Of course you do. “And what do you believe will happen to them at home?”
“Not my problem, Petri.”
“My apologies. I offended you. Of course you can’t worry about the people you kick out.”
They returned to their work. They fell back into their normal pattern and quietly ignored each other for another hour. Petri
thumbed through his beloved dictionaries and scrawled long, messy notes in the margins of a document. Kim pecked away on her
keyboard, forcing yet another translated document into her hard drive—or trying to, at least. She began making mistake after
mistake. She corrected, then corrected the correction, then repeated the first mistake again. Her brain and her fingers seemed
to be coming unglued from each other.
With a loud curse, she finally pushed away from her desk. She wheeled her chair across the floor until she ended up less than
a foot from Petri. “All right. What will happen to them?”
He quietly closed the thick dictionary. “Tell me what you think.”
“All right. They’ll be tried in court. Probably convicted. They didn’t kill anybody, so probably they’ll end up in prison.”
Petri made no reply.
“Look,” Kim said, more forcefully and with a show of considerable indignation, “all these crates of evidence from the Russians.
Proof of intention, right? Why go to such enormous lengths and trouble if they don’t intend to put them on trial?”
“As you say,” Petri replied with a slight grin. The answer was now so obvious, it was staring her in the eye. She knew it.
After all these months of sweat and hard work, and of unrelenting pressure from her bosses, it was only natural for her to
suppress it. But pieces of it kept bubbling to the surface. Little fragments. Niggling doubts and caustic uncertainties.
The frustration was killing her. “Damn it, Petri, Konevitch stole the money. He’s guilty. He plundered his own bank, he ripped
off hundreds of millions.”
“Is that so?”
She waved a hand at the crates stacked neatly in the corner. “Bank records. Statements from his own employees. Computer printouts
of his transactions, police reports, three full investigations from three different government agencies. What more do you
want?”
“You’re absolutely right, Kim. Who could want more? It’s all here.”
“Damn right it is.”
“A perfect little package, gift-wrapped, and handed to you on a silver platter.” This skinny little lawyer who once made his
living building perfect cases just wouldn’t let go.
“Too perfect, isn’t it?” she asked, bending forward and rubbing her forehead.
“Tell me how many cases you’ve tried.”
“Hundreds. I don’t know.”
“Any cases where every detail matched up so well? Every date coincides, every witness saw exactly the same thing, every investigator
came to identical conclusions? Everything so perfectly, so amazingly lined up? For a supposedly brilliant man, Konevitch left
behind an astonishing ocean of evidence.”
She was suddenly more deeply miserable than she had ever felt. It was inescapable now. She was fighting back a flood of tears.
“No case is ever perfect.”
She had reached the end of the journey. Petri sat back for a moment, allowing her to ponder the ugly magnitude of her discovery.
Americans were so naïve about these things.
He then commented, “We never actually tried the cases in court, you know. Not our job, Kim. We built the perfect little cases
and handed them off to others. Those trial lawyers, they all loved us. Such flawless gifts we gave them. They couldn’t lose.”
“I don’t understand. Why hand them off? You said you were a great lawyer. Since you created it, you knew the material better
than anybody.”
“I often wondered that, you know. They never told us why. Perhaps they thought the man who designs the guillotine shouldn’t
actually be forced to pull the lever and have to stare at the head in the basket. Communists. They could be so incoherently
humane in completely inhumane ways.”
Kim wanted to jump out of her chair and bolt. Just run away from this case. Run as fast and as far as her feet could carry
her.
He rolled forward in his chair and placed a hand on her knee. “They’ll murder them, Kim. Oh, they might go through the motions
of a trial… or they might not. They’ll kill them, though, as sure as you and I are sitting here.”