“What office you running for, Sonny?” I once heard someone ask him and Lippert imploded with rage.
“Hey, Sonny, where’s the shooter?” I called out.
Sonny pushed me away from the cluster of cops, against the hospital wall.
“Where is he?”
“We lost him.”
“You lost him? You lost a Russian who shot a KGB general on a live television show in the middle of New York City?”
“How do you know the shooter’s a Russian?”
“My penetrating intellect.” I looked down at Sonny. “What happened?”
Sonny tugged at an imaginary crease in his jacket, as saliva formed around his mouth. This could be a big case.
“We don’t know. Security sucks. There was like this chaotic thing, you dig? Audience screaming. People on the floor. He walks out. He walks out of the studio. Disappeared. But what else do you know, Art? Huh?”
“Nothing at all, Sonny.”
Sonny went in, I crossed the street and found a piece of wall I could lean on outside an apartment building. I fumbled for cigarettes, hands numb.
A few yards away, leaning against the wall of a brownstone, was a woman, a leather bag dangling off her shoulder, a cigarette in her mouth. She had red hair. A female detective in uniform stood at the curb, watching her. The woman pushed the heavy red hair off her neck and looked in my direction.
“Can I borrow a light?” she said.
“Sure.”
I dug some matches out of my pants pocket, lit the cigarettes. She was almost as tall as me.
We stood for a minute, smoking, silent conspirators. It was a stinking summer night. The relentless low rumble of thunder was never more than an impotent whimper, you could feel fights brew up all over the city, spiraling to the surface. Across Seventh Avenue, a few junkies dealt China White, a college kid pushed Prozac at a buck a pop. All around us, walkie talkies, police radios, cellular phones and self-importance crackled and buzzed in the city night air like crickets in the country. Somewhere a bottle shattered on the pavement.
“You’re a cop,” she said, pushing the hair off her neck again, twisting it nervously into a knot.
“Does it show?”
“Can you call off your guard dogs?” She nodded at the cop on the curb.
I shrugged. The waiting, the tension, the growing hangover from all the booze I’d drunk at the wedding made me glad for some distraction. “I don’t have much clout these days.”
“I’m Lily Hanes,” she said. “It was my show. You understand? He died on my show.”
“He’s not dead yet,” I said, but she didn’t answer.
Lily Hanes had been sitting in for Teddy Flowers that night and I think she talked because she was scared and I was there and I’m good at listening. The pulse in her forehead made a blue vein stand out in the white skin and she licked her dry lips and talked and I waited for confirmation that Gennadi was dead.
“I really liked him a lot. I liked Ustinov. It was hot and I was nervous as hell, and he was nice.”
I didn’t say anything. She didn’t want answers.
“Look, I’m a reporter, not a talk-show host. I was just Teddy’s back-up. It was the end of the summer season. The ratings dry up like my Aunt Martha’s skin in Boca Raton, you know? But it was a good gig for me. I was nervous. We were trying out this new studio space over by the meat market and I didn’t know my way around. ‘Think of the show as a dinner party.’ Teddy always says that. ‘Try to be a good hostess, Lily,’ Teddy says to me on the phone. He’s out in Bridgehampton screwing around and telling me to make like Ivana Trump. I’m always surprised someone doesn’t punch his face in.”
“What about the audience?”
“They were restless. They come to see Teddy needle the guests. That’s what makes it a hot ticket. It’s like some Japanese game show. They like him cruel. They were disappointed he wasn’t there.”
“He sounds like a prick.”
“Teddy is a prick.”
She sucked her cigarette. I wanted to put my arm around her. She smelled of almonds; maybe it was her shampoo.
I said, “You think someone set Flowers up?”
“I set it up,” she said wearily. “I did it.”
“What?”
“Ustinov writes a book. A tell-all about the KGB. He’s not exactly OJ or Chuck and Di, but he was a good catch for this time of year. What I remember is he spoke this wonderful English. We were in the make-up room and Babe—that’s the make-up woman—is working him over and I ask him where he learned it. “At Harvard University, of course,” he says. Of course. On an exchange program. “I was not the only KGB agent there, naturally.” That’s what he says. “I was not the only KGB agent there”.”
“I know,” I said to Lily Hanes.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on,” I said, but she was silent.
Outside St Vincent’s at one in the morning, I was listening to this pretty woman with red hair, waiting for confirmation Gennadi Ustinov was dead and I was numb and excited at the same time. She pushed her hair back again and finally tied it in a ponytail with a rubber band.
“He was so charming.” She put her hands over her face for a minute. “We kidded around. I asked if he had a KGB uniform under the bed. He said he preferred Brooks Brothers, but he did have an Aston Martin with an ejector seat and an exploding fountain pen. A Mont Blanc. Naturally. We all laughed. Then he fucking drops dead on me.”
She was trembling and I thought she was coming unglued. I got her inside the hospital where it was cool and we found a waiting room and sat on orange plastic chairs. A cleaning woman pushed her bucket in our direction and we held up our feet like obedient children so she could clean around us. The disinfectant stank of rotting apples and made me gag; it was the smell of mornings in Moscow, the smell of whatever they used to wash away the drunks’ vomit.
“Please. Please try to remember. Who else was there?”
“There was this real angry Russian woman in the front row who wanted to stick it to the general. In sort of a peasant blouse thing. She had these tendons in her neck that stuck out, she was so mad. Like a chicken. I remember that.”
“But on the panel?”
Lily rubbed her face. “What?”
“The other guests?”
“A Russian DJ or a record producer, something like that. Sverdloff. Big guy. He seemed OK. Smart. Also a stripper from one of those nightclubs in Brighton Beach. Olga was her name. She called herself Anna K.” Lily laughed emptily. “I think Teddy dug her up. Or maybe I did. I can’t remember. She whined a lot. Wanted her own dressing room. Tomas Saroyan. Made his money selling private health care. Other stuff, maybe diamonds. And Leonid Zalenko.”
“The fascist?”
“I used to think New York City cops were fascists. Or Richard Nixon. I was a fool.”
She got up restlessly, leaning her hip against a table that held only an empty coffee carton. Her skirt rode up over her thighs and they were silky and tan. She swallowed drily. “You think there’s any soda around?”
In the background I was conscious of people milling, waiting, hushed. Ustinov would rate. A big player in the old days, a parliamentary deputy under Yeltsin, he’d get dignitary status. In the waiting room, officials muttered in Russian and English and the orderlies washed the floor. I found a soda machine and got Cokes.
“Zalenko stank,” Lily said. “Literally. He chewed garlic”
“Why’s that?”
“Maybe to keep away the werewolves in Gorky Park,” she said and rolled the cold Coke can on her neck, then swallowed the soda in two gulps. Scrabbling in her bag, Lily found some fossilized Juicy Fruit. Like a schoolgirl, she tore the stick of gum in half and offered it to me.
“Zalenko had an agenda. Ranting about Mother Russia. The West. Ustinov just backed off. He didn’t like Crowe much, either.”
“Crowe?”
“Gavin Crowe. British writer who lives in Moscow. The kind of guy w
ho always knows everyone. Short. Bad teeth.”
She was breathing hard, sweating badly. “He just fell on me.”
“Are you OK?” I asked and she turned away girlishly.
“God, I’m so tired.” She leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Who fell on you?”
“The show started, someone got up and pointed a gun.”
“One shooter?”
“I think so. I can’t be sure. I felt paralysed. Like those dreams where you can’t stop someone from falling? Something heavy fell on me. It was covered in blood. It was Ustinov.”
“What else?”
“Stuff people tell you about wars. People screaming.” She fingered the pink jacket she carried; it was smeared with blood. She had come to the hospital without changing. “All I could think of was Jackie Kennedy’s suit in Dallas.” Finally, Lily put her head in her hands and cried. “You know what he said?”
“Go on.”
“Ustinov knew I was nervous. During the opening commercial, we’re still off camera, he looks at me and he has these wonderful blue eyes and he puts his hand on my arm. He says: ‘They are warming up, I think. I think this is going to be quite a lot of fun,’ he says. It was going to be fun.”
Around five in the morning, maybe later, the FBI agent came into the waiting room and told me Ustinov had been declared dead officially.
I went back out to the street with Lily Hanes. A stale half light came up. Even at dawn it was stinking hot. The reporter was still waiting, chirpy and hard-eyed. “Who would want to kill a KGB general?” she kept asking.
Afraid to let go, I held Lily’s arm tight and she leaned into me wearily. I wanted her to hold me. I put my arm around her shoulders.
Suddenly she pulled away, like I was some guy she’d slept with and didn’t recognize in the morning.
“I just worked it out. You knew him, didn’t you? mean you really knew Ustinov. Before. Didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I knew him.”
Sweat ran down her neck as she wrapped her arms around her bag, clutching it as if to protect herself from me. She edged toward the curb and I felt like a criminal. I followed her.
“Let me take you home. You shouldn’t be alone,” I said idiotically.
“You knew him,” she said again.
“Come on.”
“I can manage.” She was angry. “I was born here.”
I reached for her arm, but she turned and ran down 12th Street. Before she went I saw in her eyes something I’d avoided for a long time: it was my own past.
Her voice cold as ice, she called out, “What the hell are you?”
When I dragged myself home around five in the morning, I was someone I barely knew. I was angry. Scared. I switched on the answering machine and there was a voice I didn’t recognize. It spoke a literate, purring Russian that made me feel my soul was being fingered. I switched it off; I didn’t want to hear from any Ivans.
On the morning news, commentators did a lot of self-aggrandizing analysis; on ABC, Vladimir Posner appeared and spoke some sense. All I took in was that Ustinov was dead. I hadn’t dreamed it. He was dead.
The smell of girls was still in my apartment, but not of joy. Automatically, I put Lily Hanes’ name and the address of the TV studio in my computer. It was morning. Through the building, there was the clatter of kids shouting, dogs barking, TVs playing, plumbing, sex; it was early September, still summer, and the windows were all open. Normally, I love the noise of the building coming to life. I ignored it all.
Inert, hungover, sitting in front of the TV, I barely heard Ricky come in. He had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a tray with a coffee pot on it. He had changed out of his wedding suit into gray sweats and he put the tray down on a table, poured some coffee, handed me a mug, and sat in the sling chair, one leg hooked over the arm.
“You OK, man?” Rick said quietly.
“I’m tired.”
“Have you eaten? You want some food?”
“No thanks. You heard?”
Ricky gestured at the set. “I saw the early news. I’m sorry, kiddo, I’m really sorry.” He tossed me a pack of smokes.
“You want to talk?”
“You think it could have been an accident?”
Ricky looked at me. “When birds fly outta my butt.”
“Sonofabitch survives the entire Cold War and gets knocked off on talk TV.” I needed some sleep. “Give me a couple hours,” I said and Ricky nodded. He’s a kid, but he has real emotional tact.
“I’m going,” he said. “Get some sleep. I’m here. We’re all here, OK?”
I got a beer from the fridge, trying to put things together in my head. I climbed out the window onto my fire escape and snapped a few withered leaves off the geraniums I had set out in pots; they were dying in the heat and the stench was bitter.
The phone rang, I scrambled back in and grabbed it. A man’s voice spoke in Russian. The same voice, oozing concern, imploring attention, demanding tribute. It drenched me like napalm.
“Wrong number.” I slammed the phone down.
It rang again. I let it ring. Sonny Lippert’s voice played into the answering machine: “I want to see you.”
“Not now, Sonny.”
“Today, detective. Today. Before five. My office. You hear me? You listening?”
I would have dragged myself over to the TV studio where he was shot, but it would be ass deep in people; it would take all day for the cops on the job just to interview the audience from The Flowers Show.
Although I was officially on leave that month, I called my own station house and got the boss and told him I might want to offer my assistance to the Sixth where the investigation was being run. He said it was fine as far as he was concerned, but Sonny Lippert had already got to him and asked for my help personally, and Sonny was an old buddy of the boss.
I took off my clothes, put some shorts on and crawled back out and up the fire escape to the roof where I keep my bike in a shed. My back against the rough boards, I could see the river. The city made itself up out of the sludgy morning torpor, skyline sharpening up for business in spite of the murderous heat. I finished my beer and dozed.
Half asleep, I remembered that during the siege of Leningrad, when there was nothing else to eat, Gennadi’s grandmother gave him wallpaper paste. “It wasn’t bad, you know,” he told me once when I was a kid. “It didn’t taste that bad.”
He survived all of it, the war, the Cold War, Stalin’s wrath, Brezhnev’s corruptions, Yeltsin’s drunks, and ended up murdered on a TV talk show one hot night at the end of the summer, wearing his Brooks Brothers suit. For a million reasons, or, this being New York, none at all. But I didn’t believe that.
Ustinov had written a book revealing how the KGB did business, but so had half the assholes in the former Soviet Union. There had to be something else. Already I could feel the answers were in Moscow. Already the knowledge made my flesh crawl. But I would think about that later.
I went back inside and sat at my desk in front of the open window. Dawn had put roses the color of apricots there the night before and they caught the light. On my desk was the transistor radio in the shape of a baseball Gennadi had given me when I was a kid and I picked it up and turned it in my hands. “What is Mets, Uncle Gennadi? What is Mets?”
If you grow up in Moscow, you get messed up remembering. When the KGB kicked my father out of his job, no one talked to me about it. No one said anything: it was a topic for grown-ups only. But, nights, I’d see my father’s crumpled face through the kitchen door as he bent over the table, working out sums on tiny scraps of paper: how much was left, what we could afford; if they would take him away. Gennadi Ustinov disappeared from our lives, but no one mentioned it.
When my father died, I found the scraps of paper piled in his dresser drawer with his socks, the diminishing returns of a ruined life in those little sums neatly written in his impeccable hand.
The years went by, the thing in the pit of my bell
y evaporated. It was over, I told myself. I had unloaded the past. I was never going back to Moscow. Not even close. Going back was like death.
3
“I’m not going to do it,” I told Sonny Lippert later that day as soon as I saw him. “I’m not.”
“Artie, good to see you, man,” Sonny exclaimed as if he didn’t hear me, shaking my hand in the waiting room of the Federal Building in Brooklyn where he works, greeting me personally like I’m some VIP.
Sonny Lippert is a small man, but tight as a bullet; the dark curly hair holds his head like a hood. He’s maybe fifty-five but looks ten, fifteen years younger. Sonny Lippert has hard eyes like pebbles, a cunning mouth, skin like a girl.
“You didn’t hear me, Sonny. I’m not going to do it.”
“I don’t think you have much choice, Art.” When Sonny calls me Art it always sounds like a threat.
“In Brighton Beach, they kill cops. They kill cops’ families.”
Allowing himself a faint smile, he said, “You don’t have a family.”
Sonny’s ardor shriveled faster than a cold dick when I said I wouldn’t be an ear for him in Brighton Beach. He was convinced Ustinov’s killer was an Ivan. I was too, but I wasn’t going to do his dirty work. He said he had to take some calls and left me in the waiting room. I could wait. Sonny made me wait almost an hour.
I looked around the bleak waiting room of the building on Cadman Plaza. There were half a dozen unmarked doors leading from it. Raw blue industrial carpet covered the floor. The chairs were gray plastic. The smell was plastic pine. From behind a bulletproof glass wall, the couple of retired cops who worked as security guards kept watch and drank coffee from Yankees mugs.
“How ya doing, detective?” called one of the guards after Sonny beat it.
“Hiya, Eddie. Joe. Grandkids good?” They beamed and nodded, and went back to comparing family snaps and chortling over gossip in the Post.
Red Mercury Blues Page 2