Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Why? If bad times are coming then you’re a dead man. Take your kids and come. You still have a visa.”

  “This is my home,” he said.

  Svetlana was different. She believed in very little.

  “Did you ever? Did you ever believe?”

  “Not for a single day in my entire life. Not when I was a little girl and put a wig on Lenin in my school book.” I was startled because I always figured only I had committed this atrocity.

  “I think perhaps I will send Svetlana to the West with you,” Tolya said.

  “What? Like a parcel?” She let out a torrent of Russian, eyes blazing, fists clenched. “You don’t understand.” Then she kissed us both and said to me, “But I will come. I will send myself.”

  “I need the phone. Somewhere private.”

  “Come on inside.”

  Tolya took me into his father’s room. On a large desk were scattered film scripts, piles of newspapers and magazines, books, labels from exotic brandies, a couple of telephones, an answering machine, a fax, two tennis rackets and a damp bathing suit.

  “Here, you’re at home.” He grabbed my shoulder. “It will be OK. OK?”

  “OK. Take care of Svetlana.” I picked up the phone.

  “She’ll be OK. I promise.” He tossed me the keys to the Zil. “I have to do a few things. We’ll get Svet’s car and meet you in Moscow. At your hotel.”

  Tolya lumbered down the stairs and into the garden where people were dancing. I saw Gavin Crowe put on his hat and leave.

  I dialed the number on the scrap of paper. The international lines were tied up. It would take an hour. Maybe more.

  Through the window, I watched Svetlana kiss Lara goodnight and then Tolya picked up her little suitcase and I watched them walk away towards the bend in the river where I first saw her.

  I started to run out after her. Wait, I wanted to yell, but the phone rang and I went back in to the study. Wrong number. I slammed the phone down, and when I looked out of the window again Svetlana was gone.

  I tried the hospital and got Viktor. Birdie was dead.

  I was glad she was dead. Birdie without her speech was a ghost. At least I had seen her. At least we had talked. I would mourn for her later. But her notebooks were gone, if there had ever been any notebooks.

  I sat and smoked. People started drifting into the house to drink tea. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Lily Hanes.

  “I’ve been trying you. Where are you? Where is this number?”

  “I’m at a friend’s,” she said. “I went out to call.”

  “How did you know I was at Tolya’s?”

  “The hotel told me. The hotel knew where you were,” she said, but I hadn’t told the hotel anything at all.

  “Talk. You can talk. It doesn’t matter. Nothing is secret here,” I said, and Lily said, “I saw the pages.”

  “How?”

  “Please don’t ask me how, but I saw the pages from Ustinov’s book.”

  “Tell me, Lily.”

  She told me. I didn’t believe her, but she scared me enough to run after Svetlana.

  “Jesus.”

  “Take care of yourself, Artie,” Lily whispered. “Be careful.”

  “Call Roy Pettus,” I yelled, but there was static and I couldn’t tell if she heard. Then we were cut off.

  I got out of the house without anyone noticing. The Zil wouldn’t start. It sputtered, then died, and I began to run.

  I was running hard toward the village and the garage where Svetlana had left the yellow Trabant. I ran along the wooded path. The moon had turned sickly yellow and was sliding behind clouds. The birch trees were colorless, ghostly.

  Crowe was in the middle of it. Suddenly I knew. Crowe kept turning up. Crowe had been in New York, the night Ustinov died. He knew the girls at Dubovsky’s, he knew Olga and Frye and Teddy Flowers. Crowe’s father was a petty spy, a bastard. Gavin Crowe loved Svetlana, or hated me or her, or both. He would come after me again. Crowe, who said rumor was more important than facts. He knew. He knew information was what counted. It could make people disappear. It could make them believe lies. It could make them believe red mercury would blow up the world. It could make them look at the wrong thing. People had been dying and I had been blind. Uncle Gennadi. Olga. Birdie. The creep himself. Ricky as good as dead. I wasn’t a hero. I was only an ex-cop who wanted a nice life.

  I would let it be, I thought for a moment, stumbling over a tree root. An animal yowled. I would give it up now. If they got to Ricky and Birdie, they could get to Svetlana.

  The path to the village was empty, the road slick with gasoline someone had spilled and I slipped on it as I ran. More wolves howled in the hills, or maybe it was only Russians out at night picking apples or the last of the mushrooms. Leaves crackled and startled me, but they were the leaves under my own feet. I ran faster and faster past the little church that had been freshly painted, the door open, an icon blazing among candles on the altar as I ran past. From a distance, I heard the explosion.

  I was too late. The fireball twisted up into the dark night, red, yellow, the trees black against it.

  I was too late.

  I kept running and when I got there, Tolya grabbed me and dragged me to the side of the road and pushed me on the ground so I wouldn’t see the body parts hanging from the trees.

  Hours later, I think it was hours, maybe around dawn, I lay on my bed in the hotel, the bottle of Scotch on my chest, my hand around its neck. I’m not sure how I got back to Moscow from the country.

  “I’m coming with you,” Tolya had said.

  The explosion had missed him. He had taken Svetlana from the dacha to the village garage. The yellow Trabant was at the garage where she had left it, alongside a white Ford Bronco.

  “I’m so thirsty,” she told Tolya, and he said he would run to the shop for cigarettes and a Coke. She was thirsty. She was dying for a Coke, she said to him.

  “Pick me up at the shop,” he called. As he left, he saw her give the mechanic some money for fixing her car. He saw the man count out her change. Saw her smile at him.

  “I’ll get you a Coke,” Tolya had said to Svetlana. “I said I’ll get you a Coke, that’s all I said to her.”

  I didn’t want Tolya to come to Moscow with me. I told him to stay behind and look after Svetlana. To bury her.

  I wanted to get Crowe myself.

  Gavin Crowe had sold me out; only Crowe had the connections. He knew the name of my hotel. Only Crowe knew in advance that I would be at the Sverdloffs. He was a creep, a cripple. Maybe he had done it for money or because he loved Svetlana or for cheap thrills. He had taken me to the apartment near Ismailova Park, to Tania’s apartment, to show my face to the hoods who could arrange a car bombing. I knew it as soon as Furmin told me red mercury was a hoax. Crowe hadn’t taken me to arrange a purchase; he had taken me to show them my face.

  I looked at my hand and saw I was holding the kerchief Svetlana had given me with the pear in it. She was dead because of me.

  Slowly, carefully, I packed and put my suitcase next to the door. Then I lay down on the bed in my coat to think. I drank some Scotch, waiting for Crowe to answer my phone call. I knew he would call because I told his answering machine I was ready to deal with Tania, to buy red mercury, to cut him in. Would he be surprised I was alive? Was the bomb intended for me? For Svetlana? Both? Crowe sold me out, but who did Crowe work for?

  The phone rang. I looked at my watch.

  When I heard the voice on the other end, I knew what Lily Hanes had told me on the phone was true.

  13

  “I’m sorry to have surprised you, Artyom. You were surprised? Perhaps not. But thank you for coming.” I found Chaim Brodsky seated at the back of the synagogue. It was early, but a few elderly men waited under the portico, and the main doors were open. Inside, light played off the blue and gold ceiling with its painted green trees. It glinted off old wooden pews and the chandeliers. In the vestibule, an old man salute
d me. “Shalom,” he said.

  A few men in the front pews prayed and gossiped. There were no bodyguards I could see, but Brodsky’s would be discreet, one of the men at prayer, or standing in the back. In a dark blue overcoat and a gray hat, Brodsky sat, hands folded, face set in a faint smile.

  “I’m afraid that, like every other old man, I have begun to think about my roots. My grandfather prayed in this place, I like to imagine. I like to come here from time to time.”

  “That’s crap,” I said quietly. “This is a travesty. Also a cliché.”

  But Brodsky knew I wouldn’t kill him in here, although I think he chose it for the drama.

  “What’s the matter with you, Artyom?”

  It was Saturday morning; slowly the men began arriving, filling up the benches, bowing to the altar, shaking hands. The room was restless with men.

  Upstairs, a few women filed in and sat and looked down and chatted.

  “I’m sorry about your friend. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “You killed her. You killed Birdie.”

  “I was right about you, Artie, you’re a clever man. And I value you for it. Birdie’s time had come; she had become tiresome. It’s not much fun being old.”

  The noise of chanting and gossip muffled our conversation.

  “You’re a monster.”

  “Oh no, not a monster. You think that I am Dr No? Or Dr Strangelove? No, Artie, I haven’t got any poison pussycat, no piranha tank, no mob of men with tommy guns. I am sorry to disappoint you. Even the trappings, the big boat, it’s for politicians and the hoods who understand power only with reference to the movies. Actually, I dislike boats.”

  “Where’s Paulette?”

  “She’s resting.” His voice was tender. “You are fond of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.” He said it simply; for a split second, like lightning in a storm, the steel-cold eyes lit up.

  The Scotch and some pills I had taken made me numb. I found I could go for a second or two without thinking about Svetlana; I had no feeling, except a obsessive desire to kill this man. Instead, I sat and listened.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Only to keep the monsters of destruction under control. There are twenty-five thousand nuclear warheads in this country, and there is chaos. We’re looking at a military junta. A country increasingly hostile to the West. I want to help. I have given up all my other business. I was tired. Tired of doing business with hoods in and out of the government. My generation is all dead. Everyone I liked is dead.”

  “Birdie said the same thing.”

  “Did she? Yes, she knew, of course.”

  “You killed her for the notebooks.”

  “Do you have them?”

  I didn’t answer. A man and his two sons pushed past us, looking for a seat.

  “I’d like to have them, please.”

  “Is that why you called me?”

  “In part.”

  “You own billions of dollars’ worth of hardware, satellites, television companies, but you can’t get your hands on some notebooks that belonged to a little old lady.” I laughed. “How did you know where I was?”

  Brodsky smoothed the fingers of his gloves. I remembered something Roy Pettus told me the morning we had breakfast in Brooklyn, the morning after Lev cut my face. “Someone accessed your file,” Pettus said that morning.

  “It was your people. Wasn’t it? You accessed my file. When you knew Gennadi was coming to New York.”

  “I knew he would contact you. Have you got those notebooks? Should I say I’m sorry about the girl again?” He leaned closer to me. “Tell me, why did you come when I called this morning? Surely not to kill me.” He smiled gently.

  “Was it meant for me, the car bomb?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, really. A diversion. I don’t know. I haven’t anything to do with that side of things.”

  “And Ustinov?”

  “That was an accident. I was very sorry.”

  Ustinov’s shooting was an accident that opened a freaky box of tricks, and in it was Chaim Brodsky.

  “Sorry Ustinov died or that it was an accident?” I asked, but Brodsky ignored the bitter question, and as the temple filled up, the background noise grew, the men praying, whispering, constantly moving.

  “Everything passes. What is it, perhaps six or seven weeks since Gennadi died? Do you think of him often? Did you before? We were very close once, but he was a fool in the end. He was a believer. He believed. His death made things difficult. It meant people began asking the wrong questions. People like your Mr Lippert. Perhaps Miss Hanes.”

  “People like me?”

  “All you ever had to do was come to me, Artie. We’re family.”

  “The missing pages in Ustinov’s book, you had them deleted.”

  Brodsky shrugged. He made a tiny gesture, like a man bidding at an auction, and quietly, two men materialized at our side. They stood against the wall, well-dressed men, watching Brodsky and me.

  “Gennadi always had a taste for melodrama. He wrote some nonsense about me and what he liked to call atomic terrorism. I thought it better omitted. That was all. His murder was a mistake. Some of what followed was planned, some random. It always is. It always is.”

  Lily Hanes had said to me, “Sometimes, things just happen.”

  “So Gennadi knew about you and the nukes. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Ustinov was killed for what he knew by mistake, I thought. “Birdie knew?”

  “In her way.”

  “Was The Teddy Flowers Show a set-up?”

  “It wasn’t necessary. Phillip Frye planned to promote Gennadi’s book in the normal course of things. Mr Flowers is terribly malleable. And Phil Frye simply understands his business.”

  “And you own them both. A lot of effort for a few pages in one book.”

  “There might be other books.”

  “Did Flowers let Lily Hanes sit in for him on purpose?”

  “No one has to tell these people anything.”

  “They know the corporate message.”

  “It’s in the bloodstream.”

  The synagogue was packed now. Brodsky looked at the massed bodies of men attending to their God with noisy reverence.

  “I’ve had enough of this now. Will you come with me?” He got up and buttoned his coat. Automatically, I held the door.

  “Thank you,” he said, pleased, and left the synagogue; I followed him. Out the door, between the white pillars, down the steps to the street.

  The bodyguards followed a few steps behind. At the curb, a man in a suit and cap waited in a gray Volvo, but Brodsky waved him away. “It’s a lovely day, let’s walk.”

  We walked. The Volvo followed us, keeping pace.

  “I love my country,” Brodsky said. “There is no other place like America. But we are ruining ourselves. We are greedy. We don’t want to pay taxes. We’ve destroyed the educational system. Our kids carry guns like chewing gum, they are growing up like animals. They have no moral life. We have done it to them.”

  He sighed almost inaudibly.

  “We have a media which is completely amoral. It purveys whatever entertains the people, who conspire in their own exploitation. Before long, we will have executions in public on television with advertisers buying time. We have given the country away to the zealous little shits of the right wing and the Christian Coalition who preach law and order. In truth, they cause the chaos and killing, pro-lifers, so called, who shoot doctors. No one will stand up to them. And they do nothing at all about the waste from nuclear weapons. It is going to kill us.

  “There is no discipline. Perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps the Chinese have got it right. Happily, not in my time. No one promised us more than two hundred years of democracy, Artyom.” He adjusted his hat. “Do you think a few years of democracy have made any difference here?” He gestured to the broken Moscow streets around us, busy now with shoppers, tourists, hustl
ers, beggars.

  “Tell me, Artie, which is stronger? Fear? Love? Let me tell you about how we have turned the planet into a nuclear garbage dump. At Rocky Flats in Colorado, and Oak Ridge and Handford and Amarillo and Utah and Nevada. Us. The Russians. What shall we do with it? Fire it at the sun? Bury it in glass? No one knows, you see. No one.

  “Here in Russia, the whole country is a stinking atomic dump. But plutonium is a national treasure. They think we want to take it away from them. To take away their power literally and figuratively. They’re right, of course.

  “Russians love electricity. Power to the people. You remember? In plutonium reserves, they have a century’s worth of power, a means to blackmail the West. Without it, this is a third-rate country with a few violin players. But you know. You know all that.”

  The car kept pace with us. We skirted Red Square, and Brodsky turned to admire St Basil’s with the sun sparking off the gold domes, then walked down towards the river.

  “You can read these things in the newspapers. There are no secrets, only idiots who cannot read them.”

  My hands were terribly cold. I started sneezing. Brodsky gave me his handkerchief. He summoned the driver who had kept pace with us in the car. We got in.

  Brodsky kept talking. His voice was low, but hard.

  “I try to help. I pay their scientists through my foundation. You met Furmin?”

  I nodded.

  “He understands the new technology.”

  “You own Furmin.”

  He smiled. “Yes. Yes, you could say I own him.”

  “What’s he worth?”

  “To me, a great deal. You can’t get rid of nuclear power, Artie. The world is a plutonium-dependent economy, the way it was once petroleum-dependent. Whole economies are built on nuclear power, the British and the French with their billions in reprocessing plants. The Japanese. So desperate to feed this economy they send the material by sea. By sea! Fourteen tons on a ship that takes two months. Consider the Exxon Valdez. Consider what would happen if such a ship broke up carrying radioactive waste. Do you think the Japanese will give up their nuclear ambitions? They have no oil. What about the North Koreans? Or the Chinese?”