Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Phillip Frye?”

  “Yeah.” I left my Aunt Birdie out of things. “You think it’s connected with Ustinov?”

  “Someone who didn’t like Ustinov. Someone thought he knew too much. Someone who thinks if he told anyone here what he knows he might have told you.”

  “And how would he know I knew Ustinov?”

  “This is New York City. Rumors slip around like greased pigs. Lippert knows. I know.”

  “Any leads on the cleaner?”

  “The NYPD doesn’t exactly share their stuff with us less someone orders them to.” He was mildly sarcastic.

  “The video tape any help?”

  “Not much. We got tape of the show by the mile. But video tape is deceptive.”

  “We’re talking an Ivan? A cleaner? A hired gun?”

  “Seems like.”

  “But why kill him now? Why on TV?”

  Pettus shrugged. “It only makes sense as a warning. Revenge. You want to tell me about the cuts on your face, detective?”

  I was silent.

  “Did you know I once handled your case?” Pettus said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I did some work for immigration in those days. I was interested in you. You spoke languages. You were smart. We figured you for a KGB plant.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t kid,” Pettus said. “After you were cleared, a lot of people wanted you, but Sonny Lippert was first in line. He got you what you wanted, I guess.”

  “What do you think I wanted?”

  “A regular life. No past. A little adventure, but not too much. I’m guessing.” Pettus stirred half and half into his coffee, watching the swirl, like a man dreaming of Wyoming where he came from.

  “I know you’re officially on leave, maybe quitting the department. It’s none of my business. I also know you have a personal stake in this. I’d be grateful if you’d keep me posted. I’ll give you my home number.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Pettus was straight, I figured, and I knew I’d need help. But he’d want something in exchange. I told him about the creep in Brighton Beach.

  “Where’s the knife?”

  “In my car. I’m taking it to Maxie Crabbe. You know her?”

  “I know Maxine. You want me to send it over for you?” He was asking me to trust him. I nodded.

  “I’m gonna level with you, detective. Ustinov’s murder is not my turf exactly. A case like this goes straight to top brass out of DC. But I been following the Brighton Beach mob locally for years. We used to go easy. You remember how the CIA advertised in Russian-language papers? It was an invite to every creep to make a few bucks. But back then we had some control. Now we give out visas like peanuts on the airplane. You know we opened an office in Moscow?”

  “I heard.” I was restless. He was holding back.

  “My opinion, it’s worthless. Go home. Take care. These Russians are scary. I interviewed one guy, they made him cut off his own ear and eat it while they watched.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I got you something.”

  Pettus hoisted a scuffed brown leather briefcase onto the table. He snapped open the old-fashioned brass locks and took out a package in a plastic bag and handed it to me. It was from the duty free at Sheremetyovo Airport.

  “This was with General Ustinov’s things. It was addressed to you.”

  “What’s in it?”

  Pettus smiled slowly, picked up the check, extracted a five dollar bill from his back pocket. I saw that from time to time he allowed himself a part: he was Gary Cooper in High Noon.

  “Fudge,” he said.

  “Fudge?”

  “Yes. Fudge. Some photographs. You have an aunt name of Mrs Birdie Golden?”

  “Yes.” “

  “She the type of lady asks a KGB general to carry fudge to New York City?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be in touch?”

  “Sure. Does Sonny know you gave me this stuff?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You should have been a New York smartass with all that education and the clothes. But you never were.”

  Pettus was hard to resist; I have always been too easily flattered by powerful men, maybe because of my father, or Gennadi, or the system I grew up in.

  “Anything, what?” I said to Pettus.

  “Who the cleaner is. Why he wanted Ustinov. If someone else is involved. The meaning of sex, death and rock and roll.”

  I looked up, surprised.

  “Hell,” he said. “I went to Woodstock.”

  “Why does Lippert want me off this thing?”

  “Maybe he wants this franchise for himself.”

  “You hate the guy.”

  “No,” Pettus said mildly. “I just don’t like the ambition. It’s like cataracts. Blurs the vision. He once screwed over a couple of my men. I have to go now. And detective—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let me know what you think of that video.”

  Roy Pettus scared me. This was no conspiracy theorist looking for a high. This was not a guy who got his hair in a braid lightly. Gennadi Ustinov was dead on a TV show. Someone was after me.

  It was still early, downtown Brooklyn still pretty empty. It was hot, but I was shivering and I trotted out to my car and put the bag Pettus gave me on the front seat, gingerly, like it was a bomb. I turned on the ignition; the car stalled. Goddamn antique piece of Mustang crap. I was going to buy a new car next time instead of this thing that plagued my life. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I didn’t wait to find out. An empty cab cruised down from the Heights and I grabbed the bag and ran for it.

  The driver was Russian. Halfway over the bridge, he slowed to a crawl. There wasn’t any traffic. It was terribly quiet.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “Car overheats,” he said blandly and I recalled this was the exact spot where someone shot at Zilber, the Brighton Beach hood, from a passing car; the bullet got him smack in the eye.

  7

  Gennadi Ustinov smiles out at me, eyes blue, chin on his hands, elbows on the table. Even coming at me through this crap video I stole out of Sonny’s office, he is still a handsome man. I remember the face and it makes me ache. Dapper, alluring, he has a face you want to talk to, confess to. He leans forward, he appears completely candid and looks only at you, inviting secrets. It was his trade.

  Gennadi always wore American clothes, his vanity invested in the effect, the Brooks Brothers summer suit, a blue button-down shirt, a red silk tie. He loved America.

  He was made for television: the cameras loved the cheekbones, the pale blue eyes were cool for a cool medium, the Slavic mouth, the voluptuary’s smile warmed up the face. He leans forward energetically as if he has something to tell me.

  Beside him on The Teddy Flowers Show is Lily Hanes. He speaks to her but I can’t hear. The camera pans down the table to the other guests, then to the audience. A man is on his feet, his arms outstretched. There’s a gun in his hand, but he turns and puts his free hand in front of his face like he knows the camera will steal it.

  In the audience, people screaming, running, flopping onto the floor. Gennadi tries to get up from the table, then falls over and slides off his chair. Over and over, I hit the remote and rewind, then push forward and watch him fall. He falls on Lily Hanes in her pink jacket. They slide off their chairs onto the floor.

  I switched the tape off. My face hurt. I was running a fever, from the cuts, or an infected gum, or from fear. I had stopped off at the dentist’s when I got back from Brooklyn and he fixed me up temporarily and shot me up with antibiotics, but I couldn’t sleep.

  I sat at my desk smoking, and cigarette ash fluttered on the pile of papers, Xeroxes and faxes, rap sheets and immigration forms and green card dossiers and all the background reports I’d been able to call in from friends around town so far. The fax chattered constantly. A friend who works at the Tim
es tapped into a database and it spewed stuff about the Russian mafia onto my fax. Nothing much I didn’t know. It’s never about information, anyhow; it’s about figuring out what the facts mean and getting proof.

  Maxie had the knife, but she would have to look at it in her own time, on the sly; it wasn’t her case; it wasn’t mine either.

  I froze the video on Gennadi.

  They were golden boys together, him and my father, as kids, as young men, Khrushchev’s best and brightest; they were going to get socialism right. Best friend, surrogate uncle, the glamorous Uncle Gennadi who came back from America with jazz records and beautiful shoes and radios in the shape of baseballs.

  Little by little my father got pushed, the KGB not liking its top guns married to noisy contentious Yids who questioned the system, which is what my mother became, in their eyes. Quiet Jews were OK, noisy Jews not so good. Did Gennadi stick by him or betray him? We never knew. No one ever said. When I was fifteen, we left for Israel. That was that.

  I pushed play and watched the characters jiggle into life. Lily Hanes had them lined up like the cast of those British mystery novels Russians used to love—my mother adored them—suspects at a dinner party: Sverdloff; the stripper; the yuppie, Saroyan; the fascist; Crowe, the Brit. A Russian game of Clue; Comrade Red in the parlor.

  I focused on Zalenko. He was a bald man with a beard which made him look like his head was on upside-down. Zalenko spoke good English and his eyes glittered with the sheen of the zealous. He was rumored to be Zhirinovsky’s successor, the new nationalist sweetheart with good connections to the American right and the Christian Coalition.

  My mind wandered. I watched Gennadi Ustinov die again. The more I watched, the more I was convinced the creep on Brighton Beach the night before was the man with the gun. I would get a blow-up made off the video, but from what I could see here, he was a real Ivan: angular face, high cheekbones, thin mouth. Ukrainian, maybe. He had been handsome, but he looked sick, greasy strands of pale hair falling on his forehead.

  “Talk to me, you piece of shit,” I whispered at the screen in Russian. “Talk to me. Tell me why you did it.”

  I flipped on the news. Shootings were up. Some rightwing terrorists had trucked a van into the city crammed with fertilizer from upstate. Gennadi’s murder. Already, the pundits were pontificating about the meaning of an on-air shooting, live, on television.

  It was the kind of thing Gennadi might have once invented himself for a propaganda lecture: a man shot to death on television is the result of rampant abuse of promiscuous freedoms in the United States, he would have said. Sitting at the kitchen table in Moscow, my mother would have snorted with laughter and made fun of him for saying it.

  It was all a long time ago. The bad stuff had faded; it seemed to belong to another guy in an old photograph from a different life, the kind where you look at yourself and think, Who’s that?

  After all, what was the big bloody deal? People had really suffered in that miserable sonofabitch country. I didn’t go to the Gulag. I didn’t starve. It was the dread of never knowing, and, later, the unspoken things.

  By the time I was fifteen, I was out of it. At nineteen, I was in New York. Methodically, like a million other immigrants who wanted to unload the past, I put it behind me. I didn’t see Russians or read it or talk it except for work when I had to. Ironically, it was useful for work. Even as a kid, I had a knack for languages like everyone in my family, but only a knack, like karaoke.

  No one in New York cared where I came from. New York was the air I breathed; it was all I ever wanted anyway.

  I switched back to the tape. On Lily’s other side was the Englishman, Gavin Crowe. Lily Hanes looked wonderful. She had a sexy, friendly face. She had great legs. She was smart.

  You’re a pervert, I told myself. Your father’s best friend is getting blown away in front of you and you’ve got the hots for a woman with red hair and long legs.

  Dog-thirsty, I got a cold Corona out of the fridge. I called a guy who owed me one and got my car towed from Brooklyn and fixed. For a while, without meaning to, I dozed in my chair. I was feeling so lousy, I didn’t wake up until around two a.m. so I went to bed. In the morning, I got on the phone and schmoozed some more people at The Flowers Show and discovered that Gavin Crowe was supposed to be staying at the Chelsea Hotel.

  In my opinion, the Chelsea Hotel, which is next door to a dump that sells lobsters and Spanish grub on 23rd Street, is a shithole. A bunch of artists and writers who couldn’t afford better made it a shrine and Sid Vicious croaked there, also Dylan Thomas, I think.

  When I got there, Crowe was in his room smoking Russian cigarettes.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi. Been living it up some?” He gestured at my face.

  Crowe was smaller than he appeared on the video. Five two, maybe less in his socks. He wore high-heeled cowboy boots with lifts in them and bell-bottom pants. Briefly, in the sixties, according to the dossier I had, he’d played in some British band no one ever heard of. He was some kind of writer, he said. Crowe, who had the lousy teeth and pitted skin you get from bad food and too much booze, was English and he leaned on it.

  “You want to talk a while?” I put myself into low gear. He was repellent, but I was cool. Cool it, I said to myself. I inherited some kind of bad gene where the Brits are concerned. In private, my pop called them “teabags”. Perfidious Albion, he said. That was why they made good spies to start with and lousy ones in the end. But they wrote great books.

  Also they make great whisky. They talk in whole paragraphs—I went out with a string of English girls for a while so I could listen to the way they talked—but I don’t trust them much.

  “What shall we talk about?” Crowe said.

  “This and that. Gennadi Ustinov. The show. The murder. Russia. You. Me.”

  “I’ve got a plane later,” Crowe said. “You can buy me a meal, though.”

  “You’re going back already?”

  “Well, some policemen did ask me quite a lot of very dull questions. They decided I didn’t do it. Bit boring that.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The butler?”

  I don’t have much of a temper, but I really hate cute. Crowe was almost a foot shorter than me. I dragged him to the window and opened it.

  “You see the street? You want to make contact? You want to end up street pizza?” I said. This was not cool but the guy got to me.

  “Street pizza.” He beamed. “I must write that down. Street pizza, I love it. So, you’re from Moscow.”

  I was silent.

  “Oh, relax, darling. I used to do linguistics once upon a time. I’m the Henry Higgins of my generation. I can tell where anyone is from, especially émigré Russians like yourself. Except to me, you sound like a born New Yorker.” Modest he was not.

  “But I am hungry and I’d like to eat something before I go back to Ma Russia and the upcoming revolution, so if you want me, you’ll have to feed me.”

  “What revolution?”

  “Whichever.” Crowe was already out of the room.

  In the street, he flagged a cab and ordered it to Little Italy. We went into some dump. It was early and the place was empty. Crowe ordered chianti and linguine with red clam sauce.

  “This stuff was on the wall when they shot Joey Gallo over at Umberto’s Clam House,” he said twirling the pasta around his fork. “Did you know that? I knew a cousin of Gallo’s, interesting family. Obeyed the code,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe anyone talked like this except on Masterpiece Theater, which I used to watch with Dorothy Tae, who was addicted to Brideshead Revisited.

  “Who set up the killing?”

  “That’s easy.”

  Crowe took a slab of bread off the table, spread it with butter, dipped it in olive oil, ordered veal parmigiana and ate. He talked with his mouth full.

  I got some antipasto and picked at the salami.

  “Tell me.”

  “Zalenko. Had to be. He
hired your Ivan. You see why? Ustinov was old guard. Old guard KGB. Didn’t like dirty tricks. Believed in the system. Was perfectly decent, after his fashion. Too decent to care about my old man, of course, but that’s the point. He wanted to tell all. He wanted to tell more than was good for him.”

  “Your old man?”

  “Spy.” Crowe drooled slightly. “Old man was a spy. Minor spy. Finished up in Moscow. Not in the Philby league, of course. No one made my old man a KGB general. Felt he ought to be grateful they took him in at all.”

  Crowe liked the idea of himself at the center of his own movie.

  “Let’s get back to Zalenko.”

  “Yes, well, as Ustinov saw it, it’s the nationalists like Zalenko who are destroying the country.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Ask my friend Phillip Frye. He got me on the show. He knows where the bodies are buried. There’s a paper trail.”

  “And?”

  “Information costs.” He stuffed his mouth with more food. “Have you got funds?”

  “I’ll think about it. Why kill him here?”

  “Zalenko is in bed with the mafia. They use each other. When the fascists take over, the mafia will be in place officially. The new Cossacks.”

  I ate a piece of hot sausage and drank water.

  “You think Zhirinovsky’s bad? Wait till you see the next generation. Very respectable. Young. Clothes from the Gap. Good English. Cozy with the new American right. Practicing Christians, as it were. They hate Clinton. He wants to take away their nukes.”

  “What?”

  “The Russians love their nukes. Russians think America wants them to dump their plutonium, which would make them a third world country; no nukes, no power. Me, I’ll have to get out. They’ll be after me.”

  “You?”

  “I’m a democrat, small d to you, of course,” he said. “I was there, in my way, in the coup.”

  “Yeah? Which side?” I asked, but he was impervious. “So how did Zalenko arrange to have Ustinov killed?”

  “Easy enough. Bring in a contract killer. Pick one up in Brighton Beach. Doing it on the show made it a public assassination. That’s how they operate. I can introduce you. I live in Moscow, but this is my subject. I know my way around Brighton Beach, I know the gangs all over town, Gum Sing in Crown Heights, Koreans in Queens. Russians have ties to all of them.”