“Were there always so many pretty girls here?”
“You weren’t looking,” Tolya said. “Things change and do not change. A moment can be a little bubble of reality,” he said.
I don’t know these people, I thought. I missed Ricky.
The wind blew harder. Fall was coming. Then winter. These people could withstand anything; they could survive anything, Tolya said.
“Here, we got a thousand years of fear, so no one believes anything.”
The Métropole glowed with money. Outside, the art nouveau exterior had been restored, so the green and gold tiles glittered. Inside, there was marble and glass and brass, potted palms and security guards whose jackets bulged visibly with weaponry. When I was a kid only foreigners went to the Métropole, or people with heavy connections, and entry was strictly monitored. Nothing much had changed, except the cast.
In the bar, along with the hangers-on looking for a story or a deal or a piece of negotiable gossip, we ran into Gavin Crowe. Crowe was anybody’s, temporarily at least, for a few whiskys in the Métropole where he held court. Currently, he was drinking with a hood from New York in a silk jacket; the man said he was a union official, or a private eye, I can’t remember which. Both, maybe. He was clearly also CIA, one of the old new boys of the Iran-Contra generation, self-aggrandizing, still believing in all the spook hocus-pocus in spite of the fact the organization let a mole like Aldrich Ames run the show for years; in all that time, not a single CIA agent noticed what a rookie from NYPD intelligence would spot in five minutes. I kept looking at the door; Svetlana was late, if she was coming at all.
Crowe left his friend. “What’s up, man?” Crowe said. Tolya introduced me.
“We’ve met,” I said.
Crowe introduced a couple of American kids who hung on him like the holy grail. “Been here long?” he said in Russian.
“A few days,” I said in English.
A waiter asked me what I wanted in English. I answered in English. Everyone figured I was foreign and I let them. When I spoke Russian, I heard myself talk with the weird inflections of someone who’s been away too long; I had to pay attention to pick up slang.
“Me, I’ve been here donkey’s years. Eight? Six? I think, Toli? I’m part of the scenery. Gone native. Dasvedanya. Etcetera. Whatever. Hey, did you hear the fascists are proposing official pogroms again? Bloody anti-Semites.”
“But what about the English?” a low voice said. “I have heard people often discuss the arrogance of the Jews. In Shepherd’s Bush, not Smolensk.” It was Svetlana who had come up behind us. She put one arm on her cousin Tolya’s shoulders, and took my hand. I touched her arm; the flesh was round and soft.
“Darling Svetlana,” Crowe cried. “Have some champagne.”
“What do you know about nukes?” Tolya asked Crowe.
“I’ll have beer, please.” Svetlana looked around briefly. All the men at the bar looked at her. She gave off sparks.
“I know everything about nukes, darling,” Crowe said. “What do you need, or is this a little fishing expedition for our friend here from New York?”
“Who trades in radiologicals?” Tolya said.
I sat silently looking at Svetlana, listening to Crowe.
“Well, let me see.” He swallowed some whisky. “The intellectuals, so called, trade what they can, in between whining over the withdrawal of state subsidies. Naturally, they disdain all material things, but a poet has to eat. There are Jews, natch, racially different, addicted to money-making, so my most Russian friends tell me—therefore, they would deal anything. Maybe someone who did not get his “profit tax”?
“The Azeris have drugs, but also flowers, very lucrative flowers, you know. Also the film industry. I have many many dear friends in the film industry. The Georgians run the casinos, the Dagestanis do the muggings, the military is making war on some awful place like Grozny because the local mafia failed to cut them in, who does that leave for the atomic mob?”
“Please, Gavin, really.” Tolya mimicked the accent, grinning at me. “This stuff I can read on the Internet.”
“The sixty-four thousand dollar answer is: everyone,” said Crowe. “A million comrades worked in the nuke trade. And don’t let’s forget the locals who sell gossip they invent to foreign hacks, then tell them that in Russia, gossip and rumor are as important as fact.
“The nuke thing is one honeypot of a story, kiddo. So. Do you want me to take you to talk to someone? Or maybe you want to actually buy the shit?”
“I want to buy. I want to know who’s got it, who sells it. I’m not interested in small-time hoods. Only players.” Tolya ordered a beer.
“OK.” Crowe nodded. “What else? And by the way, how’s your delicious mama? And that absolutely fabulous little dacha of hers?”
Tolya got the drift. “Gavin, find me someone who’s trading red mercury. And Gavin?”
“Yes, my love.”
“When you’ve got it why don’t you come out to the dacha? We’ll have a party.”
Crowe nodded and disappeared into the men’s room.
“He’s not stupid. He knows people,” said Tolya.
Crowe returned. I had to get away. I said I had work. “I’ll see you guys.”
As I turned to go Gavin Crowe, who had perched on a bar stool, making him almost my height, flung an arm over my shoulders. He leaned on me with greasy good fellowship. I shook free.
Svetlana had an evening class. She was learning Portuguese because she had a yen to see Rio. She said quietly, “Artie, maybe I can help.” We were still in the bar and she lowered her voice. “I was a journalist once,” Svetlana said. “I know some people.”
I asked her to see what she could get on Ustinov, maybe Brodsky. She nodded.
“Why did you quit?”
“I was very young. I couldn’t stand all the lies I wrote,” she said and took my hand.
Gavin Crowe watched us go. “So long, detective,” he shouted at me in Russian so everyone heard.
4
“Good evening, Mr Cohen,” said the Tatiana at the desk of my hotel, plucking a sheaf of faxes from my box.
I had never stayed in a Moscow hotel before last night. In Moscow, I had barely been in a restaurant. These were for anniversaries or weddings, unless you were working class, in which case you went out only to drink yourself stupid Saturday night.
If the Tatianas and Natashas at the desk were impostors in this glassy modern hotel, a few miles from Red Square, so was I; I felt like a fake impersonating myself. I felt fifteen and young for my age. I had never stayed in a hotel, or come into Moscow through an airport; we hadn’t traveled much once my father became a non-person. I had barely been outside Moscow except to the sea a few times and once when Birdie took me on the train to Warsaw. I was shocked by how much the Poles hated us Russians. When we left for good, we went by train to Rome. I felt ashamed. We left like poor immigrants. I’m never coming back, I swore. I told my mother. Never. My mother had smiled, but I saw how weary she was.
“Can I help you with something else, Mr Cohen?” the girl said. I figured she had probably read my mail and retailed the information, maybe to the portly sweating little general manager who popped up from nowhere like a freaky jack-in-the-box. From his name, I guessed he was Lebanese. He hailed me with damp bonhomie and invited me to a VIP cocktail party currently underway in the bar on the mezzanine, he said. I took my key and climbed the stairs and, from the lobby, the general manager and the girl watched me.
In the bar, groups of bored businessmen licked salt off their fingers as they ate peanuts. The band wasn’t bad. A fat boy with long black hair played a tiny mandolin and sang “Worried Man Blues”. A girl in a fringed vest sawed brilliantly at her violin, stomping her foot, crying hee haw.
I was operating on beer, cigarettes and adrenalin, and testosterone. Wiped out, I sat on a turd-colored naugahyde sofa, ordered Scotch from a waitress.
A woman in a leather suit approached. “Do you mind?” she sai
d. She sat down next to me, fiddled with a gold cross that hung around her neck and took a magazine from her bag. I glanced over. The glossy magazine was named Domovoi. She flipped through articles about how to treat servants (‘Servants More Educated Than Yourself’), where to buy handmade pianos, Versace’s new look. The new Russia. I shoved the faxes in my pocket.
The woman crossed her legs. She put a cigarette in her mouth and scavenged in her bag for a gold lighter; it must have weighed a pound.
“Cartier. Special.” She held it towards me. “I am waiting for my daughter. I do not like her to be in such places.” She gestured airily around the bar. “So vulgar. My daughter is brilliant. Very cultured. We do not know if she shall go to school in England or Switzerland.” Curiosity overcame vanity, she took glasses from her purse and looked at me hard.
“You seem familiar,” she said and I figured it was some kind of come-on until the daughter arrived.
She was a sullen girl, about fourteen, with a petulant lower lip you could hang an umbrella on. She had the mother’s face, and in it I recognized a girl I had been to school with twenty-five years earlier. The mother had been in my class. I got the hell out of the bar before she figured out who I was.
Along with the memory of snow on the gold onion domes and the smell of disinfectant and vomit, if you were ever a kid in Moscow, somewhere in the back closet of your brain hangs a girl at school who would betray anyone for a good report card. Little Nazis, with pale skin, blond braids, Young Pioneer neckerchiefs always properly tied, she and her cronies whispered in teacher’s ear about the rest of us. They were obedient. Their parents scraped together a life out of favors and coercion.
“These people grew up with their moral sense in their butts,” Tolya said when I told him. “We called them the buttocracy. I went to school with a kid whose father was a favorite of Brezhnev. He cleaned his personal toilet in the farthest dacha.”
In the elevator, a camera was pointed at my head. The place was rigged solid with security; a businessman had been shot in the Rossiya in his bath the other day, left to stink for hours until the maid found him decomposing in the tub. By the time I got to my room, I was gasping for air. Paranoia was catching and I was like a fish out of water.
I locked the door, checked nothing had been touched, pulled out the Scotch, poured a couple of inches and stretched out on the bed.
Were Russian beds always so short? Did the blankets always have holes in the middle? I had forgotten.
I spread out the faxes. I read the faxes. Dan had news from friends at immigration; so did Roy Pettus.
Lev Ivanov, as he called himself, had entered through New York JFK, using the pseudonym and his own photograph. Pettus also enclosed a note from a detective in Munich. The Germans had picked Lev up a few years back. He was suspected of humping plutonium samples, but they couldn’t prove it and they let him go. No one so carefully enforces the civil rights of suspects as the goddamn Germans.
The Germans also sent Roy a picture and he had faxed it. The healthy handsome man with thick hair was unrecognizable as the demented sick man who died on Brighton Beach.
His full name was Ivan Borisovich Kowalski, aka Lev Ivanov and who knew what else. He was part Polish. His mother was dead, his father alive somewhere in Moscow. Our boy really was an Ivan.
From habit I switched on the TV. There were German channels, French, the BBC, NBC. On CNN, I registered the names of seven fine hotels in Malmö. Over the television was a window; my room looked over a courtyard. It was raining. On the other side, a girl in an office was working late and she saw me and waved.
I dialed Roy Pettus and heard the call bounce off a bunch of satellites. When I left, I had told him Birdie was sick in Moscow; he didn’t believe me, but he wanted answers. He agreed to help. I got through and asked him to fax the old picture of Kowalski to Lily Hanes. He already had. I hung up and dialed the home number of the FBI guy in Moscow; Pettus said he was a buddy; no one answered.
On my bed, I found a sweater Svetlana had borrowed that morning and I put my face in it and it smelled of her perfume, which was rich and familiar. I had never wanted anyone this much in my whole life. It wasn’t just I was bruised by Lily Hanes’ brush-off. I don’t know what it was: sex, maybe, but something else. Something completely reflexive. Like in the books. In operas. Like the way Stan Getz plays “Time After Time”.
“Will you invite me to visit New York City one day?” she had said that morning, as if all she had to do to read my mind was lift its corner.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she had said. “I would like to visit where the streets are made of gold and Calvin underpants,” she added, grinning like a voluptuous cat.
“Come home with me now,” I had said, “for good.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. I pretended not to hear.
There was a nuclear emergency at the hotel later. A meltdown. I was sweating with fear. Over an echoing loudspeaker came an announcement that shook me out of an uneasy sleep. The voice ordered all Jews into the courtyard. Hundreds of people poured out in the rain. In the middle of the yard was an immense heated swimming pool. Steam rose off the surface. People were swimming but were ordered out, again by a voice over a loudspeaker. Then, from the end of an old-fashioned crane, a horse was lowered into the pool. When it was hoisted out with the same crane and pulley, two of its legs had been amputated. I woke up, shaking.
When Svetlana arrived, she told me it was a very Russian dream. “I’m hungry,” she said and we read the room service menu like kids, ordered food, a BLT for me and melon and ham for her, and ice cream and strawberries and a bottle of white wine. She ate the melon with her hands, letting the juice run down her mouth.
“You know the best thing about the new Russia?” She smiled.
“Me.”
“Fruit. So much fruit.”
So Svetlana was on my bed eating melon with her hands when Lily Hanes called.
Roy Pettus had informed Lily about the pictures of herself that the killer left in the room in Brooklyn as soon as we found them. Roy had now passed on what information he had, including the Munich mug shot of Ivan Kowalski with the handsome healthy face. And then she had remembered.
I don’t know if she had actually remembered before, but I doubt it, and it didn’t matter. Her voice was tense, but cool. She told me about the Ivan she had known a long time ago.
When she knew Lev, he was still an Ivan, that was the irony. Johnny, he called himself; it was his Western name, he said. It was almost ten years earlier when she knew him in Moscow.
“What else?” I said.
She met him in the bar at the old National Hotel in those early heady years of glasnost. He was a good-looking boy then. Lily said, “It was just a fuck for me.”
There was static on the line, then I heard Lily again. “He started talking about coming to America. About green cards. I backed off. He was never heavy about it, but I was nervous. I left Moscow a week later. I never thought about him again. I met loads of Russians and I sure as hell didn’t put together some crazed killer with that pretty boy in the bar. End of story. Banal, huh?”
“It always is.”
I scribbled as Lily talked.
“I didn’t recognize him on the show. I didn’t recognize him on the tape. He had changed completely. I only got it when I saw the old picture and I heard his real name. Jesus, I thought. A one-night stand. It’s me he was after. It was me.”
“Are you OK, Lily?” I was stroking Svetlana’s leg. It had a peculiar curve where the knee rose and met the thigh, a long sinewy muscle, like a bike rider’s. I wanted to ask Svet if she liked riding bikes.
“I am better. I decided to take all this on instead of running away from it.” Lily’s voice was quiet.
“What did he do, his job I mean?”
“Who?”
“Your Ivan.”
“I think he worked at a magazine. Something photographic, maybe. I met him at a reception at Novosti. Does that
help?”
“Good,” I said. “Great. Thanks.” I could hear the hesitation.
“Artie, I’ll try to get something for you. If I can, I’ll get in touch. Somehow, I’ll get in touch,” she said, then changed the subject abruptly. “So how’s the big Piroshki these days? How’s Moscow?” Lily was self-conscious. I sensed she wanted to stay on the phone.
Svetlana was reading contentedly and caressing the soft pocket of flesh in the crook of my elbow.
“Interesting. The weather’s warm. Hot almost.”
“It’s cold here in New York.”
“How’s the boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard. Keep me posted, OK?”
“Sure, Lily. Yes. Take care of yourself.”
“Look, about that dinner. I wasn’t such a doll to you. Maybe I can make it up? When you get home, maybe?” she added. “I’m asking this time.”
There was a pause. The silence filled up with embarrassment.
“Thanks,” I said. We both knew it was too late.
I must be defective, I thought. Morally defective. Ten days ago, I was half in love with Lily Hanes, now I was crazy about this Russian woman. Besotted. But this was different. I was planning to marry this woman, if she’d have me. I was ready to stay in Moscow if I had to. I could already feel its gravity tugging on me. When she looked at me, it was like she was winding her legs around me for ever. Maybe I was such a lumpen guy that’s what I really wanted.
“You believe in synchronicity?” I said to Svetlana when I hung up the phone.
“Probably.” She smiled. “Your girlfriend was calling?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend. Except you. If you want. There’s no one else. No one.”
Before Svetlana, I had never really kissed a Russian girl. She tasted of melon.
5
Svetlana kissed me one more time, opened the door of her yellow car and let me out into the bruised night. Shadows moved across the courtyard of a building made of stained concrete blocks. The sky looked charred, a red glow around the edges, even in the dark.
Red Mercury Blues Page 21