“I’m on my way.”
“Good, I want to see you. Coffee’s on,” she said, and laughed, the throaty, dark laugh that was like an older woman. “If you’re good, I’ll buy you blintzes,” she added. “Strawberry.”
“I could meet you someplace, we could eat someplace,” I said, nervous now.
“Come to the apartment first.”
I had planned to go to Dacha, the club in Sheepshead Bay. Tito Dravic, the manager had promised me a video and some paperwork on Masha Panchuk, the dead girl on the swing. It was still early.
In Brighton Beach near the boardwalk overlooking the ocean was a condo built half a dozen years ago for Russians who had made some dough in America but didn’t want to leave the neighborhood. Old people, mostly. Others who had moved up and out, Long Island or New Jersey, kept an apartment for the ocean view, the shopping, sentiment, an investment.
Tolya Sverdloff had bought a condo for his mother the time she was in America. I didn’t know that after she died, he had kept it.
A doorman with gold braid on his shoulders was reading the News in the lobby and when he saw me, he faked a smile and buzzed the Sverdloff apartment, and I went up in the elevator with an elderly couple, their arms piled high with bags of food. I could smell the lox.
*
“Come on in,” her voice called. The door was open. I went into the apartment and saw her.
Behind a makeshift desk near the window, talking into the phone, reading some papers, doodling in a notebook, her face was scrubbed, no make-up, a pencil stuck behind her ear, she wore a red blouse with long sleeves and a white cotton skirt that fell below her knees. Her feet were stuck in a pair of yellow flip-flops. From somewhere-her iPod, maybe-came the sound of a lovely bossa nova track.
“Hey, Artie.” She looked up, pointed at the phone, at a chair. “I won’t be long, okay? There’s coffee on in the kitchen, honey, and you could grab me a mug, too,” she added.
I remembered the place. When Tolya bought it for his mother, he had furnished it with a black leather couch and some easy chairs, which were still here but piled with files and folders and books. On the wall was a bulletin board with the names and addresses of orphanage facilities and shelters in Russian. Tacked to the cork board were also six of Val’s photographs of Russian children. Staring into the camera, the kids looked bruised, tired, hopeless.
Most of the bedroom furniture was gone-the old lady, Tolya’s mother, Lara Sverdlova-had had a taste for frilly covers and gilt mirrors. All that remained was a bed covered with a plain white linen spread. That, and a large movie poster with Lara as a young star in an old Soviet picture. In it, she was dressed as a farm girl riding a tractor, and it made me smile. Sverdlova had always been glamorous and even in a babushka, and on the tractor, she was perfectly made up, and her hands manicured. My dad had adored her.
In the small kitchen coffee was dripping into a glass. The smell was intense, and I poured it into a couple of mugs and went back to Val.
She beamed, got up, kissed me on the cheek. “You like my disguise?” she said indicating the blouse and skirt.
I gave her the coffee. “I like it,” I said.
“I deal with a lot of poor ex-Soviets now, some from the Stans, Uzbeks, Tajiks, those people, and the Bukharians, I always think it sounds romantic, the region is called the Silk Road, you know? Tashkent, Dushanbe, really, really isolated and strange, and suddenly they’re in America. People just hanging on. Some of them are religious, I don’t go around in shorts or tight stuff, it makes my job easier if I look okay to them. But the ones who don’t make it out are in real shit,” she added.
“How come?”
“They live in these backwaters. I went once, it’s incredible, like something out of prehistory, and there’s no money, and no work, so they go to Moscow and eventually some of the girls end up working the streets, or the train stations, or worse. The people here get the news, family members get in touch, I try to put my people in Moscow in contact. Sometimes it’s the girls themselves,” she said.
“How come I didn’t know about all this?”
“I only started not so long ago. You didn’t convince my dad to stay, I guess,” she added.
“I’m really sorry. I tried.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. I saw him before he left. He said he’d make the London trip short. I hope he will.”
“What was in the envelope he gave you at his club?”
“You’re a nosey bastard,” she said, and grinned. “He gave me a big fat check for my little foundation.”
“I could give you a check.”
“You’re adorable, Artie, let’s not talk about depressing stuff, let’s go eat and maybe have a swim, or sit in the sun.”
“I want to hear more about your work,” I said. “I do.”
“I’ll tell you while we eat,”she said.
“I don’t know why you’re not fat, you eat all the time.”
“Maybe it’s genetic.” She picked up a copy of the Post from a chair. “You know about this, Artie?” Val showed me the picture of Masha Panchuk in the paper.
“Yeah, I heard.”
“When did you hear?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I knew her,” said Valentina. “Masha, right?”
When we were settled at a cafe on the boardwalk, and Val had ordered smoked fish, having changed her mind about the blintzes, and we were both drinking Bloody Marys, she asked me again what I knew about the dead girl.
“What do you mean you knew her?”
“That club out in Sheepshead Bay, the one I walked over to with you Friday night, Dacha, or maybe someplace in the city. It didn’t snap into place until I saw the paper. I recognized her from the picture, not the taped-up one, Jesus, Artie. Sometimes I wonder.”
I was surprised by Val’s cool, her composure. Most people, unless they’re on the job, pull back when the talk turns to dead people, to the cases filled with bare-knuckle ugliness.
“It doesn’t bother you, talking about it?”
“Of course it bothers me, but not the way people think,” said Val. “The stuff I see in Moscow is pretty shitty, so at least it makes me less of a pussy crybaby than most of my friends.”
“What kind of stuff?”
While I was asking, the food arrived, and Val dug into the huge platters of smoked salmon, whitefish, sable, sturgeon. She put butter on her bread, and piled it high with fish.
“What kind?” she said. “Little girls put out to work as prostitutes, parents who slash them, I mean on their faces, with rusty razor blades, if they refuse. This is big business in Moscow and no one does anything.”
“Tell me about Masha Panchuk. How well did you know her?”
“Was that her last name? I didn’t even know. I knew she was Masha, I got that, I remember, but I hardly knew her at all,” said Val. “Some of my friends told me she was illegal and I tried to figure out what to do for her, but I couldn’t, so I would give her little presents, stupid shit that girls like, a little purse, some make-up, I don’t know, some money or something, and I asked my dad about her, but he didn’t like me going out to the clubs, and anyhow, I’m always shoving my giant feet into things, so I just let it be this time.” She waved at the waitress, called her by name, asked Tanya how the kids were, and asked for more coffee. “Maybe I should have stayed with it, I mean helped Masha out, but I didn’t. Also, I pretty much stopped going to clubs last winter, you know, I mean I’m too old.”
“You’re twenty-four,” I said
“Yeah, but old for my years.” She laughed and ate more fish, and more bread, and thought about cheesecake. Val leaned back and looked at people on the boardwalk. “You want to swim?”
“I’d sink if I swam after all this food,” I said.
“What are you doing for dinner tonight? You could buy me an early birthday dinner if you want. Weird that my pop and I have the same birthday, isn’t it?”
I was flustered. I tried my usual line of joking with her.
“You’re supposed to think of me as your uncle or something,” I said. “Anyway, your father would not just kill me but do it slowly in little pieces, like the worst stuff he ever learned from his not-so-nice-nik friends. You know how they killed people in old Russia? You want me to tell you how they did it, Val? You’re thinking Pugachev, the bandit outlaw, from old times, right? I read the Pushkin story. They really did nasty stuff.” Val picked up her fork. The middle finger on her left hand was missing. She saw me looking at it.
“I know, my dad worries because he thinks this is his fault.”
*
When she was ten, Val was snatched from the Sverdloffs’ apartment in Moscow. It was the 1990s, the gangster years in Russia, and Tolya was in real-estate deals with bad people.
Tolya had been at home when they took Val, but he was dead drunk, fast asleep. He never got over it. It was his fault and he knew it, that they took his little girl, kept her for three days, cut off her finger and sent it to him. He left Moscow after that, and took his family to Florida to live in a gated community.
He offered Val plastic surgery. The best, he said. He urged it on her. You’ll be like new, he said. She refused. She wore her stump like a badge of honor, the way she wore everything- her beauty, her height.
She was a passionate, funny girl, but there were times when her eyes turned inward and she seemed far away. Maybe it was to do with the kids she helped in Moscow, the things she had learned that made her want to cut out, to stop the world. There were times I thought of her as a girl in a garden, dreaming, planning, a book on her lap, her eyes shut, listening to the crickets and the wind.
“I’m a mutant, Artie, darling,” she said. “I’m too tall and too weird. I take pictures because I’m obsessed with looking at people. Sometimes I find myself staring at them in restaurants or on the train. I want to know everything. It’s just how I am. I once ate a little piece of film, a piece of the negative, to see what it was like, see if I could make it get inside of me-Jesus, Artie, why does my dad have to be in London?”
“He likes London.”
“I know, and I’m a grown woman and I should let him live his life.” She gulped her coffee and added, “I just like it better when he’s here.” She got up.
“Where are you going?”
“What, my dad put you on my tail? I have to go pick up some stuff so I can pack it up.”
“What stuff? Where are you going?”
“For the kids, clothes, meds, stuff. I send it ahead of me to Moscow. I’ll probably go over in a couple or three weeks, and then only for four, five days, it’s just I need to get things ready.” She sounded defensive.
“Tolya knows?”
“Maybe. Butt out, darling. Look, I’m just going to Moscow to do a few things and spend a few days with my mom who’s on vacation.”
“I thought she lived in Boca.”
“Yes, so what?” Val was exasperated by all my questions. “She does live in Florida, but she can afford to travel now, so she travels, my dad gives her whatever she wants, even though they’re divorced, he says, she is the mother of my children, you know? In that pompous voice he puts when he’s on a roll? My mom has a great big dacha near Barvika, outside Moscow, okay, everything she dreamed of when she was a girl and she married my dad, and they lived in a one-room apartment in Moscow, back in the day. But her tastes she developed in Boca, right?” Val smiled at the idea of her mother’s tastes. “So she has the condo in Boca, and a place in London, and a great big dacha in Barvika, I mean huge, with a fabulous pool with faux Impressionists painted on the bottom.
“She was just this provincial Russian girl when they got married, and he was like this big rock guru in Moscow, and he performs and she lies down on the stage one night and licks his boots. She was gorgeous. What a crazy time, I wish I was there, the 80s sound so fabulous in Moscow. Well, whatevs. Anyhow, my mom’s new dacha has marble and gold taps, and there’s a tennis court, and a pool, one indoors, one out.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“He loves it. You remember him? The one who wears the yachting cap and the real gold buttons on his blazer? He has money, but now he feels he has class. I mean he’s global now. I think he comes from New Jersey. So, you see, I’ll be in safe hands. You should come visit. Moscow is wild. Daddy’s club is hot, he’s a star, he’ll be going on celebrity chef or something, or celebrity wine master, whatever.” She leaned over the table. “I love him a lot, Artie. I love my dad, you know, more than anyone? I won’t do anything to make him worry, I promise. Or you.”
“But you’re careful, right? I mean you don’t get crazy when you talk to officials over there, about the kids you help and stuff.”
“Of course not. But it’s fine, it’s all really official, we get help from NGOs, we get help from the US ambassador. You think I want to get involved with anything weird over there? Forget about it. I’m an American. I’m a perfect American girl, right?” She pursed her lips and made a rueful noise.
“You have a Russian passport?”
“Yes. Also.”
“You travel a lot, you, Tolya.”
“We like to travel,” she said, half sardonic. “Movement is everything. My mom remembers when she was my age, the only place she was ever allowed to go outside the Soviet Union was once to Bulgaria.” She put her hand up to her head. “God, my head hurts,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I’ve been feeling kind of weird lately, I don’t know, my stomach, my head. I’ve been using some new chemical in my darkroom, I think the smell makes me feel bad.”
“What kind of stuff?” Tell me, I wanted to say. Tell me and I’ll make you feel better whatever it is.
I wanted to put my arms around her, but I just drank my coffee.
“Oh, Artie, it’s nothing. Listen, did my dad ask you to work for him again?”
“Yeah, every other day. I think he feels sorry for me because I’m always broke.”
“Don’t go into business with my dad. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“That would mean the end of your love affair.”
For a moment I thought she meant us, her and me, and I was startled.
“What love affair?”
“You and my dad, of course,” said Val. “Not like that, you idiot, I mean, never mind. It’s about the best kind, about friendship. But if you went into business, you’d have to do things you wouldn’t like. It would offend your moral code,” said Valentina.
“I don’t have a moral code. You make me sound like some guy with a poker up his ass. What moral code?”
She sat down again, this time on the edge of a chair, put her elbows on the table and her face close to mine. “Well, not that kind,” she said and kissed me lightly on the lips. “For sure not that kind, Artie. We got past that last night, didn’t we? That kind of crap that says I’m too young for you, you hear me?”
I nodded.
“I’ll tell you everything tonight, I will, I promise.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t remind me of my uncles one bit,” she added, leaned over the table again and put her hands on either side of my head, and I thought to myself: don’t do this. I thought to myself: don’t feel like this. Stop. I was besotted, but it was temporary, it was a fantasy, it was like falling for a girl in a movie. Wasn’t it?
The hours she had spent in my bed weren’t casual for her, I knew, but it wasn’t for the long term. I was too old. I was her father’s best friend. I wanted her so bad I could hardly look at her, but I had to, I had to pretend we were still just friends, just family, the way we always had been. I felt, in the far distance, a little door closing.
“Tonight?” I said.
“You’re going to take me to dinner,” she said. “Don’t look so serious,” she added.
“I’m fine.”
“You look gloomy as hell,” she said, then leaned over, kissed me three times on the cheek and the little gold cross she wore
on a thin chain dangled against my forehead, as if she were a priest making the sign of the cross so I’d be safe. “I have to go,” she added. “I’ll meet you. Dinner. Around nine. Ten? And we could go to a late movie after? Or dancing?”
“Dinner,” I said. “Yes. Where?”
“My friend Beatrice’s, over in the East Village, you know the place? She cooks that fantastic spaghetti carbonara, my dad loves it, we go and he eats like everything on the menu.”
“On East 2nd Street, right? Ten.”
“Around ten,” she said.
I kissed the top of her head and said, casually as I could, “See you tonight.”
“Darling, I always show up for you, you know that, sooner or later. Sometimes later, I know, it’s my vice, bad time-keeping, but for you, I always show up.”
“Promise?”
“Artie, I do love you.”
All I could do was scramble in my jacket pocket for some money to pay the check. I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t say what I wanted to.
“Artie?”
“What?”
“People worry about me, I say, listen, I was named for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and she came back, so I always come back, too. I’ll definitely be there.” She kissed me on the cheek once more, stuffed the last piece of cake into her mouth. “You are stuck with me, Artie, darling. So I’ll be there, or as we used to say when we were little kids, cross my heart and hope to die.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The club on Sheepshead Bay was shut up. Closed on Sunday, a sign said. Tito Dravic had told me there was a house on the next block that the club owners used as an office, and I walked around the corner. A row of small ramshackle houses was on the narrow side street. The trees cast shadows on the sidewalk. Nobody was around except a tiny kid riding a tricycle up and down the street.
On the porch of one of the houses was a stack of beer cases, a crate of wine, another of vodka. I figured it was the right place. Next to the door was a piece of paper taped on the wall, a message scribbled on it: ‘Deliveries for Dacha’, and below it a cell number. I called the number. Nobody answered.
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