tempting stuff. Like all that cash floating around drugs. Times changed.
Down in New Orleans we busted that ring of cops selling dope. Helped revitalize the whole department. Fact of life.
Now the bureau is down in the cotton, chapter and verse with the homies.”
“Right, I saw an example of the new cooperation up in Grand Marais,” said Broker.
“Special case. Called for extreme measures,” said Garrison.
“What’s special? A cop maybe kills an informant, takes payoff money from a dope dealer…it’s New Orleans all over again.”
Garrison replied slowly, rolling each word off his tongue.
“I never worked bank squads, I never worked Italians and I never worked dope till New Orleans. Counterintelligence was my thing.”
“You lost me,” said Broker.
“’Cause I’m such a convincing good ole boy I worked the Klan, and the militias, but I got in a little time with the KG-fucking-B. You heard of it?”
Broker scoured Garrison’s features for a hint that the agent was joking, toying with him; Garrison’s face was stone solemn. It was silent in the car as Garrison took the exit for 694 and drove north.
Garrison let Broker ruminate. Miles of frozen landscape scrolled past. After several more minutes, Garrison THE BIG LAW/219
began to sing, almost to himself, in a mournful country baritone.
“
Garrison grinned. “Corny, huh?” He smiled. “Yeah, well, Garrisons come out of Kentucky. We fought on the Union side in the Civil War. And we fought on the union side in Harlan County. My daddy retired deputy chief in Louisville.
I got a brother just retired from Secret Service.”
His pale eyes snapped at Broker. “Always been more than a paycheck and a pension, if you know what I mean.”
“I get the picture,” said Broker.
“Don’t think so, but it’s time to expand your mind, temporary Deputy Broker. Consider this: Who was the guy Keith Angland sold the information to?”
“A Chicago hood named Paulie Kagin.”
“Uh-huh. Kagin’s
“I read about it, but I wouldn’t know,” Broker admitted.
“That’s right. Nobody does. Including us at the bureau.”
Garrison slapped the turn indicator and took the exit ramp onto Highway 5. He retreated into silence again, and Broker watched the cornfields, wood lines and silos of Lake Elmo zip past. Garrison exited onto Highway 36 and drove east past the motel where Broker would spend the night. As the road swept north in a turn toward the Stillwater business district, Garrison jerked his head toward the red brick outline of the Washington County Jail sitting next to the government center,
“He’s gone pretty nuts in there. Gave himself a tattoo.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Brother Keith has also migrated over. Scratched him a Russian pachuco cross, in blue ink, on his left hand.”
Garrison tapped the top of his hand. “Don’t know what he’s using, but in Russian prisons they mix urine, ballpoint ink, and ashes from burnt shoe soles. Like jail credentials; for instance, a spiderweb signifies professional drug trafficker.
Now a star, that’s an assassin. Not sure about crosses.”
Garrison sliced him with a thin look. “We offered Angland the usual deals to plead down. Real hard ass. He wouldn’t even open his mouth. The second time we met with him, he just laid his left arm on the table, the tattoo on one side, those stitches on the other.” Garrison screwed his lips up.
“Like he was taunting us with his wife’s murder.
“I had a good look at those stitches. He must have taken his time shoving her in. That girl fought. Hard. When we took him to the hospital after we picked him up in Grand Marais, I had the doctor pare the shreds of her flesh out from under his fingernails.” Garrison grimaced. “The tattoo is pretty unusual behavior. He’s gone spectacularly nuts. He has a real high IQ, you know. My experience is, cops and priests shouldn’t be too smart. Gets them in trouble. What they need is big dumb hearts, to soak up lots of suffering.”
He swung his slow eyes on Broker. “What did you think, you’d go in there tomorrow and get him to confess?”
Broker was now curious. He leaned back as Garrison shot through the gauntlet of Christmas decorations that draped the light poles of Stillwater. As they turned right and blew across the old railroad bridge into Wisconsin, he wondered aloud, “Keith and the Russian mob?”
Garrison stroked his chin, reached in his pocket and withdrew two horehound hard candies. He handed one to Broker. Garrison sucked on his and began to talk in a slow, deliberate cadence.
“Well, you know, we Americans like to be entertained. We tend to get distracted. While we were having our play war in the Gulf and watching the O.J. Simpson trial some dramatic changes were going on-out there.” He cast a big hand at the snow-covered Wisconsin horizon and the larger world beyond.
Garrison chuckled. “We’re about to start living some real bad B movies. Remember the old James Bond novels-SPECTRE, the international criminal conspiracy from hell. All those suspicious foreign fuckers with accents. Well, they’re here. Goldfinger. Dr. No.”
Broker frowned.
“You think I’m shitting you? When the whole shebang started to collapse over there in the late 1980s, all these forward-looking apparatchiks in the KGB heisted billions of dollars’ worth of Communist party funds and pirated them out of Russia. Socked them away in Swiss banks. At the same time they emptied the Soviet prisons to raise an army of thugs. It’s the perfect nightmare-veteran intelligence agents running nets of hardened criminals.
“These guys have literally hijacked the Russian economy.
Now they’re branching out. So they’re here, where the easy money is. ’Cause we consume so much dope. And we’re so fat and stupid.”
They turned right on a county road, slowed for a small town named Claypool and followed the twisting two- lane past empty pastures, farmhouses, woodlots, and the stubble of snowy cornfields.
Garrison continued, “But it isn’t the dope, fraud, counter-feiting, or gasoline scams I worry about, uh- uh…”
They topped a rise. Through a gnarled screen of barren oaks, higher than the nearest silo, Broker saw a golden onion dome crowned by the distinctive silhouette of a Russian Orthodox cross.
38
The St. Andrews Orthodox Church was tidy red brick with a white slat belfry culminating in the sectioned Kremlinesque dome. Atop that dome, the three-barred cross threw its long unusual shadow across a snow white cemetery lawn. Mature red pines sheltered the church. Arborvitae stood sentinel along the approach road and among the dark gravestones.
The grounds were deserted.
Garrison turned in and stopped the car across from the graveyard. The Russian cross was repeated in stubby stonework on the apexes of somber tombstones hewn in gray and black granite.
“A little touch of the Byzantine among the Holsteins and snowmobile rabble,” chuckled Garrison. He swung
