Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman Page B

said, lifting his glass. “Our little angel in Bangkok. This may be our last meeting for a time, but our hearts will stay connected.” Semion thought he saw his friend tearing up.
    Moisey grinned. “To new friends and money,” he said.
    Semion wanted to say: “To staying small.” But he didn’t. Instead he raised his glass and said, “ L’chaim .”
    Two days later, Semion and Isaak flew back to Miami.
    They relocated David Eban, the man they’d been using in Belgium, to San Francisco. He’d be in charge of picking upthe frozen squid. He was a good worker—quiet and sober. All he had to do was drive to a fish warehouse in Oakland, hand a slip of paper to a Chinese kid who worked for Fariq’s organization, and throw the squid into his van. From there, he’d take it to a place he’d rented in Fremont, put it on the ground, and come back the next day, when it had thawed. Then he’d open it up and pull out the vacuum-sealed loaves of drugs. I used to love squid, he told them later. I can’t eat it anymore.
    In those early days, Eban drove across the country once a month. He’d pack the drugs into a false compartment in the trunk of his SUV, hang a cross from his mirror, set the cruise control to just below the speed limit, and leave some toys gift wrapped on the backseat. San Francisco to Miami—four days of driving. After a while, though, these trips bothered Semion and Isaak—they were clearly the most exposed element of their plan. What they needed was a buyer in California.
    Eban suggested a man he knew in San Francisco, a Russian named Tyoma Chernov. Chernov had a history of moving drugs; he and Eban had met in Belgium, back when Eban lived there. As it turned out, he wasn’t interested—he’d gone clean—but he knew someone who would be willing to work with them.
    Chernov had served two years at DVI. He got a message to Arthur, and Arthur set Eban up with Gloria Ocampo. Eban and Gloria met face-to-face for the first time at a steak house on Van Ness Avenue. Afterward, he flew to Miami to speak with Semion and Isaak.
    “She looked like a Filipino cleaning lady,” he said. “But she’s legit. I checked. She’ll buy the whole thing. Chernov vouched for her.”
    “Can she be trusted?” Semion asked.
    “Of course not. But she has money.”
    “Gloria Ocampo,” said Semion. “How old is she?”
    “She’s older, fifty, sixty? She’s normal, a normal old Filipino lady, not like a druggie. What do you want, someone with tattoos and blue hair? Rides a fucking Harley? She’s good; she has money. She’ll buy it, come back, buy it again. You’ll never meet her. She’ll never know your name.”
    “Ten a pound?”
    David made a pained face, waved his hand. “No problem,” he said.
    That was how it began. When the Burmese group had a batch, they sent Mr. Hong an e-mail. Coded in the message would be the weight and location of the pickup. Mr. Hong would then go and find Semion at one of his clubs, where the noise made any kind of audio recording difficult. Semion would relay the information to Orlov, who would use a public Wi-Fi connection at a Starbucks to send a coded message to an intermediary in Israel. The intermediary would find a Wi-Fi–enabled cafe (never the same one twice) to relay a second coded message to Moisey, in Bangkok. Semion used a similar system to communicate with David Eban in San Francisco. Their messages bounced from earth to space, from phone to satellite, meaningless to everyone but them.
    Every month, Mark Orlov delivered their payments to Mr. Hong’s lawyer’s office in Miami. Semion had no ideawhere their money went, but, if forced to guess, he would say he suspected it was laundered through several legitimate-seeming businesses or real estate purchases before being packaged and carried to Burma and China. Or maybe it was simply wired in nine-thousand-dollar increments by old Chinese women at different Western Unions all over the southern United States. Money, Semion