his door open. “C’mon, stretch your legs.”
They walked among the granite slabs: Liwisky. Born 1869.
Died 1933. Brusak. Zema. At intervals, drab indestructible plastic flowers jutted from the snow.
Garrison threaded among the graves, stopped, stooped and swept snow away from a headstone-Lorene Angland-1923-1996. He glanced up. “We all have mothers, Broker. This here’s Keith’s.”
“Keith’s Russian?”
“Half.” Garrison pointed at the two larger grave markers that loomed over the headstone. “Her parents.”
Boris and Laura Kagin. “Not like he embraced it. Never spoke the language. The pastor told me the only time Keith ever walked into this church was the day they buried his mother.
She grew up here. Moved to St. Paul and met Keith’s dad.”
Garrison pushed on his knees with his palms and stood up. “Buried in July, two years ago.” He reached inside his trench coat and pulled out a black and white photograph.
The graveyard in summer. Broker imagined heat. Shiny shoe leather among tall blades of grass. Ants. Keith Angland stood among a crowd of mourners. Men with hands like sledgehammers protruding from the too-short sleeves of their dark suit coats. Women in black babushkas. Farmers from around here. Working people. A Russian enclave he never knew existed.
The two men Keith was talking to weren’t local clod kickers. One was short, balding, his ample middle wrapped in a double-breasted suit. He was introducing Keith to a gaunt very well-dressed man with short cropped hair. The photographer had caught them shaking hands.
“Did you take this picture?” Broker asked Garrison.
“Hell no. I’ve got too much time and grade to be low crawling through the woods over there with a camera. We have young guys-and, ah girls-for that. But because of this meeting in this graveyard Keith Angland’s name was put on a list.”
“What list?”
“They call it the Russia Squad. Not real original, but there it is.” Garrison tapped the picture. “The short guy you’ve heard of, Paulie Kagin, a distant cousin to Keith’s mother.
Came all the way from Chicago for the funeral. And what’s more natural than to introduce another old friend of the Chicago branch of the family. This guy shaking hands.”
“Who is?”
“Victor Konic. Worth a couple hundred Kagins. He’s an entrepreneur, I guess you’d call him. He runs a couple of banks, in Moscow and Chicago. He used to be a colonel in the KGB. Worked out of embassies and trade delegations, here, in the U.S. He specialized in recruiting American agents.” Garrison squinted. “He still does.”
“What?” Broker pointed at the grave. “Here?”
Garrison nodded. “Just making the initial connection. Keith is too good a prospect to pass up. And the link with Kagin makes it natural, them meeting.”
Broker felt like his carnival ride just left the Wisconsin State Fair and went global.
Garrison blew on his hands, covered his red ears with his palms and stamped his wing tips in the snow. “Now, if you’re coordinating a coast-to-coast criminal enterprise in a new country, and you’re these guys, you make inroads into the local power structure. You need advice on how the law operates, their techniques and habits. Hell, man, Angland graduated with honors from the academy in Quantico. This was, you know, before he went into… decline.
“Okay. You’re Kagin and Konic and company-you want to recruit a believer. You want to gratify someone’s deepest yearnings. Give them a home. What did Keith Angland want above all other things?”
Broker studied the black tombstones against the snow.
“He wanted to run things.”
“There you go. But the world took a giant dump on him.
Unfair maybe, but it happened. So he starts screwing up, starts drinking, having problems with his wife. Along comes his long-lost relative. Remember me? We met at Lorene’s funeral. Just a businessman setting up some new ventures in Minnesota. And they talk.
“And the businessman says, you know, I can help you with these black kids from Detroit and Chicago, the ones running around with guns, who make you so nervous. The ones shipping that nasty crack cocaine into town.
Suddenly all these gangbangers get popped, and Angland starts making big busts.
“But then comes the dark side of the deal. Help us or we tell the cops how you got the information. Powder and heroin start mainlining into the suburban market. Almost like the Russians know the local game plan. And they did. Because Angland sold it to them. Then they give him a taste of power, and he likes it.
“I brought in a snitch-Alex Gorski-the only goddamn snitch we have in the Russians-and he got close to busting Angland-he disappeared and the bastards sent us his tongue in the mail.
“The problem is we don’t speak the language. We only see the outside. We can’t see in because we don’t have an informant base inside their organization. And we need one real bad. And in a hurry. Keith fingered the only one we had.”
Garrison turned up the collar of his trench coat. “World’s coming in on us fast. You got a kid?”
“A daughter.”
Garrison nodded. “Then you should know about The Suitcase.”
“The suitcase?”
“Yeah, back at Quantico there are floors full of people who worry about nothing but The Suitcase. And when it’s going to arrive. We know for a fact the KGB adapted tactical nuc-lear weapons to be delivered in a suitcase. And right now, the Russian military establishment is not just up for grabs, it’s for sale.”
Garrison squinted across the cold Wisconsin farmland and mused, “That bridge Clinton wants to build to the twenty-first century won’t get there if some Russian scumbag peddles one of those satchels to Hamas or Hizballah. They tuck one of those babies in the parking ramp of the World Trade Center”-Garrison’s hands sketched a mushroom in the air.
Broker nodded slowly. It explained the sudden chill on the phone from former colleagues. Keith had gone beyond the pale, and Broker was the only one, besides a lawyer, he’d talk to. His eyes swept the graveyard. “The same old un-declared war with the Russians, huh?”
Garrison nodded. “And Caren Angland was a casualty.”
In a quieter voice, “You should understand these things, you wore the uniform. You fought.”
Broker felt like he’d blundered back through time, into the muscular church of his youth.
“What do you want, Garrison?”
“It seems he wants to tell you something. Possibly he has remorse about his wife. If you can get him to talk about what they did with Gorski, tell him maybe we can work a deal for him. Especially if he can link Gorski’s death to someone higher up than Kagin.
“We found Gorski’s car in the Saint Croix River, by an old ferry landing near Scandia. Somebody jammed the gas pedal and sent it out through the ice. We want to know if Gorski went into the river, too.”
“You and I have similar problems. It’s a stronger case if you have a body,” said Broker.
“The thought has occurred to us,” admitted Garrison.
Broker stared across the gravestones, into the tangle of oak limbs across the road and asked, “Did you ever find the money?”
“No. It was cash, in a suitcase. Easy to transport. Keith had plenty of time to sock it away someplace. Hell, down in Missouri, they’re still digging up stashes of old bank notes the James gang buried. We’ll probably never find that money.”
Since Garrison was in a generous mood, Broker asked,
“How did Tom James get on to Caren?”
“That’s easy. She called him up from home. We checked the phone logs at the paper. And her phone bill. The time checks out. December 12, 10:33 A.M. James said the caller disguised their voice. We found a commercial voice changer at the house, in her bedroom.”
Broker couldn’t see Caren calling a mediocre reporter.
More likely, the feds, maybe even Garrison, had sicced the reporter on her to spook her into cooperating against Keith.
