Late into the third week, he'd watched her disappear into the rear of a long black limo that took off at a gallop. Click, click. He hit the gas and followed. Next stop was a seedy, run-down nightclub on the city outskirts. More click, click, click. A short man with a large bent nose and graying ponytail dashed out of the club and clambered inside.
From his former days as a Mafiya crimebuster, Mikhail instantly put the name Nicky to the furtive figure wrapped in black leather. The limo's license plate told the rest of the story. It was registered as a company car by Golitsin Enterprises.
Usually the meetings by the Moskva lasted no longer than fifteen to twenty minutes. Today's meeting dragged on for over an hour. Big things were afoot, Mikhail guessed. At one point, Nicky climbed out, stumbled uncertainly for a few steps, then he whipped it out and peed in the open. More click, click with Mikhail's long, wide-angled lens. He chuckled to himself.
The most feared thug in Russia, Nicky Kozyrev, had a teenie weenie.
He made his weekly telephonic report to Alex that night. The pictures were bundled into a large envelope and sent off to the Watergate apartment.
17
Late 1994 The apartment bought by Alex and Elena Konevitch was riverside, on the sixth floor of the sprawling co-op building, gazing fitfully over the brown muddy waters of the broad Potomac and within yelling distance of the majestic Kennedy Center. Even after a year, Alex remained dismayed by how preposterously small it was. A two-bedroom, one for sleep, the other converted to a tiny, cluttered office shared by the two of them. At an amazing cost of almost a million, it had to be the most expensive eight hundred square feet in the city.
But it was safe. Lots of important and famous folks made their nests inside this famous building-they demanded privacy and good security, they paid out the nose for it, and they got it.
Elena adored its simplicity. The small space suited her fine-it was easy to clean. Alex felt cramped, squeezed, slightly claustrophobic. He loved big, open spaces and frequently cursed Golitsin for stealing his home, for exiling him to an apartment that would be swallowed by his old bedroom.
The contract for the co-op, their phones, their cars, their insurance-everything was registered under Elena's maiden name. The name Konevitch disappeared from sight. On Mikhail's expert advice, to be on the safe side, every two months Alex flew in and out of Chicago, brief trips where he liberally sprinkled the Konevitch name around Russian nightclubs and neighborhoods. On the first visit he even signed up for local cell phone services with unlisted numbers. Maybe the bad people were still hunting them, maybe not.
Safe beats sorry every time, Mikhail advised him.
Alex and Elena were one year into their new life, and their new careers were flourishing. The requests for political asylum had come through ten months before. Their lawyer, Martie P. Jones, MP to friends, or to anybody, really, had been as good as advertised. Better, in fact. MP had started his career laboring in the trenches as a lawyer in the stodgy legal office at the Immigration Service. He knew exactly what buttons to push, with a Rolodex that would put the New York phone book to shame.
A few calls to the right people and Alex and Elena's request was stamped "expedite." A few weeks later they were ushered into a sterile room before a small panel of serious people, sworn to honesty, and asked to present an abbreviated version of their sad case. The panel looked bored and impatient initially. That quickly changed. For starters, Alex opened his shirt and offered a long, nauseating gaze at the hammer-and-sickle emblem fried on his chest. A minute later, out popped the photos of Alex's overall physical condition, blowups of the photos taken by the doctor two days after they landed at Kennedy International. They were color and close up. MP accompanied the visuals with vividly horrifying descriptions-see, this is where the chair broke on his leg; the bruised lumps here, well, those are fractured ribs; and so forth. The wounds were brutal. Several members of the panel gasped and looked away. The verdict was returned promptly.
Approved, but only conditionally-welcome to America, land of the free and the brave-now go out there and make us proud you're an American.
Just one glitch: you must have a job-a place of permanent employment before permission to apply for full residency was granted.
Any job with a domestic corporation was also easily traceable, and therefore out of the question, so Alex immediately contacted his old friend Illya Mechoukov. They had met four years before, when Illya was first toying with the idea of jumping into mass-market advertising. No such thing existed in the Soviet Union, at least not in the same sense as in the West, where big companies spent billions each year shoving their names out into the marketplace. Illya was young, only twenty-five, and seized with the progressive idea that he would mimic the huge Western advertising firms. His business would explode quickly, he was sure, and the money would pour in.
A great idea that instantly hit a brick wall. Illya was odd-looking, with a hooked nose, unbalanced features, long woolly hair, and a thick black beard that looked revolutionary. But he was filled with brilliant concepts that poured out of his lips in quick, nervous bursts. He was inventive and wildly creative; unfortunately, he was also far ahead of his time. The former communists had no idea what he was talking about, or why it mattered. People went to stores. They grabbed the item off the shelf. The very idea of spirited competition sounded confusing, possibly immoral. The notion of trumpeting your own product struck them as haughty, self-indulgent, a blatant waste of money.
Three minutes into his initial pitch in Alex's office, Alex leaned across his desk. "Okay, I've heard enough. Here's the deaclass="underline" I'm buying you. Not just your advertising, you. I'll fund your company, but you'll service my accounts before all others. I'll be the chairman of the board, you'll be the president, the chief of daily operations, and the brains. It's your show to run, and I expect great results."
Illya tugged on his beard and briefly considered this remarkable offer. "You're kidding."
"Yes, it's a joke. That's why I am about to write a check for five million dollars. Buy the best film and printing equipment on the market, hire good people, and call me if you need more."
The company was legally incorporated in Austria, close to Russia's border and surrounded by cutthroat Western competitors. Alex insisted on this. Rivalry was healthy. To survive, Illya and his people would be forced to absorb the best Western practices, sharpen their own wits, and bring that state-of-the-art knowledge to the Russian market.
Better yet, Orangutan Media, as Illya had named it, was not technically part of Konevitch Associates. To get through the doors of Alex's competitors the firm had to be notionally independent. The only legal documents that evidenced Alex's financial interests were filed with the Austrian authorities. Thus, Orangutan slipped under Golitsin's radar.
Alex now offered to represent the company in America, and the timing could not be better. The big American corporations were floundering in Russia. All those years of a wall separating the two worlds left the Americans clueless about the local culture, local wants, local psychology. What worked like magic in the good ol' USA, resoundingly belly-flopped in Russia. The Pepsi generation caused deep bouts of head-scratching; how could a generation be defined by some stupid soft drink? Doctors recommending this pill or that antidote were unconvincing. Russian medicine was dreadful; anything they recommended was promptly blacklisted from the family shopping cart. And as for all those sports stars hawking products, another bust; who cared what some muscle-bound freak gobbled or drank or rubbed on his body?