"They tried once, they'll try again," he'd said as they lay in bed that night after the police left.
She'd tried to allay his fears with the old journalism adage that the most dangerous time for a journalist with damning information on a potentially dangerous person or organization, like the mob, was prior to publication. "After it's out, the only thing they'd accomplish by killing me is to bring more of a spotlight on them," she said. "Remember back in 1976 when Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, was killed by a bomb planted under his car? He'd been digging into allegations of land fraud concerning the mob and corrupt officials. I was one of thirty reporters from newspapers around the country who went to Phoenix as part of the 'Arizona Project.' We finished the job Bolles had started-a twenty-three-part series on official corruption, organized crime, and land fraud in Arizona. Even the mob now thinks twice before killing a journalist because it focuses too much attention on them."
Murrow was hardly mollified. "I wouldn't care that the job got finished if someone blew you up."
"Ahhh, you're so sweet, Silly Gilly," Stupenagel replied, and then kissed him. His steadfastness in light of his near-death experience touched her. Most of her former lovers would have headed for the hills to protect their hides, much less been more worried about her than themselves. "But you're missing my point. The sooner I can put a wrap on this series, the sooner there's no point in killing me. When I get done with them, the cockroaches will be scurrying for cover, not trying to get to me."
The look on Murrow's face told her that he didn't believe a word of it. He knew that what she'd said was true, but only to a degree. The bad guys were sometimes perfectly willing to kill a journalist out of revenge and to send a warning to other journalists that sometimes the First Amendment was bought with their blood.
The first round had gone to Stupenagel and a wooden baseball bat. The dead man had been identified as Don Porterhouse, a multiple offender with a history of sexual assault, assault, and burglaries. After she read his police jacket, something didn't seem right; Porterhouse didn't strike her as the sort to attack grown men with a garrote, and there was no mention of him being a trained martial artist. But a friend of hers at the Medical Examiner's Office had confirmed that the body he had autopsied had been positively identified as Porterhouse.
The bored NYPD detective who'd been assigned to the case had attached himself to the theory that Porterhouse had intended to burgle and rape Stupenagel and that Murrow had surprised him. "He just grabbed the first weapon he could think of," the detective said of the garrote. When she ventured the possibility that the man had been hired by someone upset with her stories, the cop had politely taken notes, but she could tell that he was doing it to humor her.
The story was the reason she was out on a blustery night to finally meet the man with the Russian accent who had been supplying her with her inside tips regarding Nadya Malovo, the Russian terrorist, and now some character named Jamys Kellagh, who was supposedly in the middle of it all.
She had been trying to meet the Russian source personally ever since the first call, but he'd refused. Then out of the blue, he'd called her that afternoon and suggested that they meet that evening. "I have something to give you in person," he said.
Although she didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, Stupenagel was curious about the change of heart. "Why not just mail it to me?" she'd asked.
"Because what I have to give you is one of a kind and cannot be trusted to a third party."
"Can you tell me anything about it? I mean, geez, it's awfully cold outside." There was no way in hell she wouldn't have met the man, but she'd learned from experience to always try to garner as much information while she had someone talking, just in case they didn't show up or disappeared altogether.
"Don't play games," the man warned. There was a pause, and she could hear him talking to someone in the background, although not well enough to understand what was being said. "I will tell you it has to do with Jamys Kellagh."
"You win," Stupenagel surrendered. "Where do you want to meet?"
On the way over to Brooklyn, she'd stopped by the Karp-Ciampi loft, ostensibly to check in on Butch's rehabilitation. But really she wanted to feel him out on the Russian agent, Nadya Malovo. The attack on St. Patrick's had resulted in several murders on his turf, and even if he was cooperating with the feds, she thought, ol' Butchie wouldn't have been too happy to hear that a suspect had been turned over to the Russians and then conveniently disappeared.
However, the district attorney and his wife were getting ready to entertain "a couple of friends from Idaho," and there'd been no time to talk. I didn't know they had any friends in Idaho, she'd thought as she left the loft. Her reporter radar told her to delve a little more into these "friends" when she could get Marlene alone with a bottle of wine.
Stepping back out of the alley and onto the bustling sidewalk, Stupenagel got the impression as she always did in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach that she had awakened in a foreign city. The part of the avenue that she was on ran beneath the elevated subway track, which created a steel cavern that looked straight out of a futuristic movie. But it was hardly the physical setting that was unsettling.
Framed by the community of Coney Island to the west, Manhattan Beach to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, Brighton Beach was home to one of the largest Russian communities outside of that country, so much so that the inhabitants referred to the enclave as Little Odessa. Hardly anyone on the streets, whether they were store owners, vendors, or passersby, spoke anything but Russian, though the salesmen quickly switched to English when they spotted a visitor with money. The signs above and in the windows of the stores were written in Cyrillic, and even the Dogs Must Be Curbed sign had a Russian translation.
Stupenagel had done plenty of stories on the Russian community of Brighton Beach, and she knew that they were different from the Russian Jews who'd escaped what had been the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. And she knew that they were different than the wave of Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in the neighborhood at the beginning of the twentieth century after fleeing the pogroms of tsarist Russia.
While not as openly murderous as the tsarist Cossacks, the socialist regime that the new immigrants had lived under suppressed their culture to such a degree that they conformed to be more like their non-Jewish Russian neighbors than the orthodox Jews of the past. Jew was their ethnicity, but not necessarily their culture and religion. For instance, the fashions they wore-like their non-Jewish counterparts-looked straight out of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, at least the winter scenes. Everybody seemed to be wearing expensive fur hats and coats.
Wishing she was as well insulated, Stupenagel pulled her Saks Fifth Avenue wool coat around her shivering body as best she could; she maneuvered down the sidewalk past old crones dressed in black and muttering Russian epithets, and vendors hawking "real Bulova watches" and potato knishes.
Naturally, the area boasted the best Russian restaurants in the five boroughs, and Stupenagel's stomach growled at the thought of tonight's dinner with her "date." The caller had named the restaurant, and she'd immediately known its location, having been there many times in the past.
The Black Sea Cafe was famous for its mouthwatering dumplings called vareniki and pelmeni. Vareniki came in a dozen varieties of fillings, from sweet farmer cheese to sour cherries, enclosed in paper-thin dough, topped with sauteed onions, and bathed in drawn butter. When she'd had her fill of them, she would switch to pelmeni, which were stuffed with boiled meats and then drenched in a sauce of cheese and eggs and gratineed.