Chapter 7
Magda walked along the street in front of the building that her boss and mentor Oleg Porchen had built.
It was four stories of black glass that reflected the near-constant Los Angeles sunshine.
Behind the glass were walls that stretched from the floor to a height of five feet on each level.
Inside the wall was a layer of steel plating that Mr. Porchen said was thick enough to stop an anti-tank round.
She had known it was probably a lie, but it was good for morale.
New signs on the outside of the building indicated it was now owned by a real estate development company. She wondered why these signs were almost always printed in bright red in America. It made them look so cheap and gaudy, making a brave and visionary thief’s stronghold seem clownish.
Oleg Porchen had suffered for this building.
It took years to build to his specifications.
The contractors were always finding that the materials—first the steel and glass—were not available to exactly match the order.
Then it was the light fixtures, and then the faucets.
Midway in the installation of the heating and air-conditioning units, there were faulty parts.
They couldn’t be replaced because those models were about to be discontinued and made obsolete by newly designed and superior models, which would not actually be available for a few months.
Mr. Porchen had been in a rage about some aspect of the construction project every day for years.
The worst parts had been the basic electrical system, which would go dead, and the pipes, and anything else that had water running through it or condensing in it, would leak.
There had been two times when he had changed suppliers or subcontractors, and the old contractor had simply vanished somewhere in the hills, the ocean, or the desert.
One contractor had been in charge of the parking system.
Cars driven to the building were supposed to be parked in the two-level lot under the building.
The elevators that a driver then took to the floors of the building never worked right, and at times, people had been stranded inside them.
This bothered Mr. Porchen because it tarnished his reputation as a host to important visitors, and compromised the security of the building.
If he needed to, he wanted to be able to call his people in, like the knights of a medieval castle.
He used to ask Magda, “Making an elevator that works. Is that so hard?”
It was. It was also difficult to make the six-screen ultrahigh-definition television system in his office operate.
The installers would come and work for a day assembling a new sophisticated system for showing five sets of computer-fed images and a sixth for security zones.
Later, when Mr. Porchen would pick up the remote control handset and press a button, it might as well have been a brick.
It was dangerous to look foolish in front of his vors, the word that meant thieves, but in most cases implied much more, so after each failure he ordered a larger set of screens.
That made it appear that he had simply learned bigger ones were available.
He had improved the situation, as great leaders tended to do.
The last ones he ordered before his death were eighty-five inches.
Magda stood at the tinted glass entrance of the building, shaded her eyes, and stared into the lobby and the hallway beyond.
They were empty. The building had the look of a place that might never be occupied again.
She had never quite understood how American businesspeople made the calculation that it was better to tear down a building and replace it rather than make a few modifications.
She assumed that, as in Russia, there were so many aspects of a business deal that could put somebody in prison that the simple arithmetic was a thing to be hidden.
She considered trying to find out who owned the company that owned this building now.
She had hoped to come here and find some remnant of Mr. Porchen’s group operating his businesses.
She needed men, and only a few of the people who had worked for Mr. Porchen had been killed in that last failed job. Where were the others?
Had they been killed, imprisoned, or deported, either in one terrible screwup, or one at a time? Had they simply been unable to find methods of monetizing their criminal behavior the way Mr. Porchen had, gone broke, and drifted apart? It was a mystery.
Magda walked away from the building. The Bratva in Boston would be expecting her to work quickly to earn back their investment in her. She had been hoping to bring back men she already knew and could trust. She would just have to catch the first flight to Boston and find some there.