Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  I laughed. “And you’re going to fix it. That’s what this is about.” I saw Brodsky didn’t like it when I laughed at him; it was the only thing that got to him a little.

  “The only safeguard is a new generation of breeder reactors that uses up nuclear fuels in a safe, self-sustaining cycle,” said Brodsky.

  I laughed again. “Even I know breeder reactors went out with the Bee Gees. We tried it, in the seventies, when people thought there was a shortage of uranium. The thing doesn’t work, Chaim. So what’s the big fucking deal, Chaim? Huh? It doesn’t work.”

  Brodsky replied calmly. “Not mine.”

  “Yours?”

  He put his hand on my arm and said, “Will you listen? I know all about the breeders we tried building. We need one that uses nuclear fuel in a self-sustaining cycle, that feeds itself, that is used only for civilian power, with no waste. We tried, but we quit, the way we gave up on health care, on education. The technology was wrong.”

  “And only yours is right.”

  “Only mine, yes.”

  The river was the color of sludge, even in the sunshine. Brodsky believed in his project, the way the Soviets had believed in red mercury. He was crazy, I told myself. I would kill him, I thought, but I didn’t believe it. He knew. I knew. I felt paralysed.

  “What do you suppose we will do with all this plutonium if it is not recycled?”

  I was silent.

  Brodsky said, “We will need a war.”

  The car took us towards the Arbat, to Spaso-Peskovaskaya. We came to the small square; a couple of kids chased each other. There was a pretty but tumbledown church. On the ambassador’s residence an American flag blew cheerfully from a pole.

  Kill him, I thought to myself. Kill him before you get inside. For what? For revenge?

  “What are we doing here?”

  “I am staying here. Paulette is inside resting.”

  The car pulled around to the other side of the elegant old building, and we went in.

  “I’ve always loved Spaso House.” Brodsky gestured around the yellow and white mansion as if we were tourists, admiring the high ceiling, the gardens in back. Glancing at some pictures, he added, “I only wish we had ambassadors with better taste in pictures. Wasn’t it Matlock who had rather avant-garde things of his wife? I think it was Strauss who brought in ghastly landscapes in big gold frames. I wonder if they’d take something from me.”

  I followed Brodsky past the cloakroom and up the stairs, past a small reception room. A maid was on her knees polishing the lovely wood floor. On the next floor up, he led me to a small suite. Brodsky took off his overcoat. He had on slacks and a sweater. He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle and poured sherry into ornate little glasses. He held one out.

  “Do take off your coat.”

  In the pretty sitting room, we were alone. A clock ticked. I kept my coat and sat on a hard chair. The doors were closed. I could get to him and kill him, but how would I get out?

  Swimming laps in his pool all summer, Chaim Brodsky did the backstroke and dreamed of all this chaos.

  He had as good as killed Birdie, Ricky, Svetlana. He didn’t light the match but he had whispered in someone’s ear.

  Red mercury was a red herring. He knew!

  “And you run this show this from a beach house in East Hampton,” I said.

  “You’d prefer the Spaceship Enterprise? God is in the detail, as you know,” Brodsky said.

  I thought of the tacky trade in death, the dead bum in Penn Station, Lev’s father, the strippers who were mules, Valya Golitzine with her salami, the dying dogs, skins flayed. Steel hockey pucks stuffed with radioactive pellets would be coming onto the market alongside Russian dolls.

  The door opened. Paulette Brodsky appeared quietly and sat on a chair against the wall, next to a window, listening, lighted up by Chaim’s presence, in his thrall. She wore a yellow silk dress that was shot through with light. A maid came with a tray with a teapot and cups and sandwiches, and Brodsky waved her away and poured the tea himself and took a cup to Paulette, kissing the top of her head. I didn’t know if I could shoot him in the face with Paulette in the room.

  Gently he touched Paulette’s shoulder and when she opened her eyes, I realized they were vacant.

  “It’s early stages of Alzheimer’s,” he said pitifully but I felt nothing. Nothing.

  “Something else bothers you?”

  “You buy a publishing house in New York. You bought Teddy Flowers’ TV show. Tabloids in London. Some magazines on the west coast. Radio stations all over the place. You’ve been buying newspapers and television companies in Russia that are worthless. Picture archives. Film archives.”

  “Remember your history lessons. Information is more valuable than the weaponry. Television is more dangerous than an ICBM.”

  “How did you persuade the Russians to give it to you?”

  “When Nixon died, and thank God he died because I could not have stood one more evening in his foul-mouthed presence, I became the new Nixon, so to speak. The expert on Russia. I could do as I liked. Clinton was biddable. Clinton let Dick Nixon into the White House, after all. Clinton told Yeltsin I was a hedge against fascism. Better Brodsky than a Zalenko.”

  Paulette had fallen into a light doze. She stirred slightly then slept again. Somewhere a party was in progress.

  Brodsky talked fluently; my eyes darted around, how to get him, how to get out.

  “People don’t believe in the danger of radiation, their governments have lied to them so consistently everywhere for fifty years. Fifty years, Artyom, fifty years since J. Robert Oppenheimer dropped his bomb in the New Mexican desert. Did you know I met him several times? Oppie knew.

  “But who remembers? You can’t hear radiation like gunfire or feel it like hunger or smell it like poison gas. The Cold War is over. Instead of cleaning up the waste, we have PR men telling us radiation is no more harmful than golf.”

  “Golf.”

  “Yes. I can only help people if they are afraid. Only fear will save us.”

  “But the rumors weren’t enough.”

  “Not quite.”

  “You needed the real thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “You arranged for the samples to reach New York City.”

  “Not I.”

  “The mob does your bidding.”

  “They need new scams. Gas is old hat. The government is cracking down on Medicaid fraud. It works nicely.”

  “But you never ask. They internalize it, like corporate guys. No one asks. No one says.”

  “As we said earlier, it’s in the blood.”

  “Then why bother with the mules? The creeps? The Levs?”

  “The small fry are important. The atomic mules, the sample men, the scrap merchants, laundry men and whores, the mafiosi with their little jam jars and big ideas. Do you think if a Rafsanjani, a Saddam, wants something, they go to a mule? When they can buy direct from Nobel Prize-level scientists on site in Russia or one of the old republics? There are bureaucracies as big as General Motors completely devoted to the transfer of illicit nuclear materials. German bankers, Italian judges, Iranian businessmen. Only a very few care about ideology; the business of terror is business. It’s a way of life.

  “So you see this Lev was a necessity. He was, shall I say, handy. Zeitsev too, he put out a line.”

  “And I was on the end of it,” I said bitterly, as I realized Brodsky knew everything. He knew all of it, and the pretense that he was somehow aloof from the ugly petty violence, the creeps and hoods, was part of a myth he half believed.

  I thought of Lev again, and of his father.

  Brodsky went on, “It’s the little people we need the most. Without them, the system doesn’t work.”

  “Cannon fodder.”

  “What an old-fashioned idea. The two-bit crimes also keep the story alive. Radioactive material, however insignificant, smuggled into Western Europe, or better still, into New York City scares people. A few
grams in Brooklyn is more frightening than a hundred tons of plutonium in Tomsk.”

  “And if it goes wrong? If we end up with a nuclear explosion at the World Trade Center?”

  “There are trade-offs.”

  “You’re insane, you know.”

  “It’s the oldest of ethical questions. Who would you save, Artie? Your girlfriend or millions of people? Which is the moral choice?”

  “The end justifies the means.”

  “Artie! As you said, no clichés, please.”

  “And the red mercury?”

  “Who knows? It was useful. It sounded marvelous, don’t you think? Lethal, elusive. A fabulous joke. As they say, a red herring. It doesn’t matter.” He turned to look at his wife. “It doesn’t matter, does it, Paulette darling?”

  She was still asleep, smiling sweetly.

  Red mercury was a joke.

  “Ivan Kowalski said he didn’t attack Ricky Tae in my apartment. Did he? Someone came after me and got Ricky by mistake.”

  “He told you the truth. You were getting in the way. I’m sorry it was your friend, Artie. I’ll make it up to you.”

  I got up.

  Instinctively Brodsky put his hand on his wife’s arm. She opened her eyes and reached up to touch his face. He turned to me. “Is this the part where you kill me?”

  “You’re not going to win, you know. It’s all empty talk, this saving the world. You won’t get your deals now. You won’t get your franchises. You can’t own nuclear power.”

  I could see Brodsky was angry. “Someone will.” He did not move.

  “You can never come home now, you know, to America.”

  “Don’t be silly.” He looked around and gestured to the embassy residence and what it stood for. “I am at home.”

  Paulette Brodsky watched. Suddenly the door opened and the maid appeared with a Marine guard. Through her fog, Paulette had felt my rage towards Brodsky and she had moved to protect him, had pressed a button and the maid answered.

  “Is there a problem, sir?” the Marine said politely.

  “Is there, Artie?” Chaim Brodsky said.

  “You don’t believe you can really own all the information, do you? The gossip? The rumors? The news?” I had my hand on the door.

  “Only enough,” Brodsky said.

  “For what? Enough for what?”

  “I want to own the fear.”

  EPILOGUE

  New York

  Sonny Lippert was waiting for me when the plane landed. I got in line at immigration, impatient to get to Ricky. Once I had been scared of this process, now I had the pushy disregard for it of a regular American.

  But the immigration guy took his sweet time and we exchanged views on the Knicks. He thumbed through a book, then punched me up on his computer.

  “Business or pleasure?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your trip. Business or pleasure?”

  Why was it taking so long? What was going on? On the other side, where the conveyor belt was already spitting out luggage, I saw a few cops I knew from immigration, but there were always cops here when the Moscow flight landed.

  It was after I got my passport stamped and hauled my suitcase off the luggage carousel that I saw two of them come at me.

  “You stupid frigging dogbrain,” Sonny Lippert said when the pair of cops deposited me on the sidewalk, but I think he smiled when he said it, if you could call the thing that made his mouth twitch a smile. I’m on your side. Tell him, Roy, will you?”

  Roy Pettus was waiting in a car at the curb. “Roy, tell this dickfist ex-cop that we are on the same side. You dig, Art? If you won’t listen to me, listen to him.”

  “Let him talk, detective,” Roy Pettus said to me. Wind whipped around the terminal building, rain spattered the passengers, a double row of yellow taxis honked.

  I got in the back of the car. Sonny got in front.

  “We heard about the girl and I’m sorry, I am sorry, Art, but if you’re thinking about some kind of vengeance, don’t be stupid.” In the driver’s seat, Sonny turned the ignition.

  “We picked up both Zeitsevs. We think Junior is going to testify. If he does, it will be the beginning. Thanks to you, we got him. Also, we stopped the nukeshit coming into the city, for the time being, anyhow. We got Moscow finally going on the atomic mules. We’ll get the others. We’ll do this together. Don’t be a Russian. Revenge is not cool, man,” he said, revving the car.

  It wasn’t enough. Zeitsev wasn’t enough for the damage Brodsky had caused: Birdie, Olga, Ricky, Lev. And Svetlana.

  “You knew I was in Moscow.”

  “You didn’t exactly make a secret of it, Art. I put two and two together, I get four, like you. I talk to Agent Roy Pettus. Finally, Agent Roy Pettus deigns to talk to me.” Lippert took off for the Expressway. He drove like an old lady.

  Slouched in his seat, Roy was mute. All that was visible was his head, like something in granite snapped off of Mount Rushmore. Like a wayward child, from the back seat, I watched them spoiling for a fight.

  “You knew about Svetlana?” I could barely get her name out of my mouth. “How did you know?”

  “We heard. I’m sorry.”

  “How did you hear?” I already knew.

  “Sverdloff is our friend. He’s your frigging friend. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “He spied on me.”

  “He saved your ass.”

  “You set me up, Sonny. You set me up the day you took me off the case. You said you were throwing me a bone. You knew I’d go to Brooklyn. Didn’t you?”

  Sonny shrugged. “I took a chance. If you cracked it, I could still take the credit and prosecute the case. You were off the picture, officially. If you messed up, I was off the hook. I could be the hero who saved you.”

  “Or else I would be dead.”

  Rain smeared the windshield. Flicking on the wipers, Sonny kept up a stream of talk. Roy Pettus sat silently.

  “What about Ricky?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. My friend Ricky Tae. Who beat him up? Who made him a vegetable?”

  “We don’t know for sure. We think Zeitsev sent men after you, your pal took the beating.”

  “No, he didn’t. I’ll tell you who did it.” We were on the bridge, the city visible through the rain when I told them about Chaim Brodsky. I told them everything and I could see their disbelief; they felt sorry for me.

  I went home. My place was clean and someone, maybe Lois, had put flowers on the desk. On the fire escape, the geraniums were withered, yellow, dead. I pulled the shades and went to sleep for—what? A week? I got up to eat, went to sleep again, visited Ricky, then slept, twelve, fourteen hours at a time. I dreamed about Svetlana every night; it didn’t bring her back in the morning.

  When I finally surfaced, it was Halloween and I turned on the TV, gaping at the news while I drank coffee and took a shower. Chaim Brodsky announced a delay in his plans for a nuclear reactor due to his wife’s illness; he was taking her on a long cruise, to Israel perhaps, he said, to search for his roots. Gennadi’s book made the best-seller list. A network picked up The Teddy Flowers Show. The murder rate in New York was down. The market was up. In Moscow a young reporter was killed when a suitcase full of documents about the atomic mafia blew up in his face; I didn’t have to wait to hear it was Eduard Skolnik, poor bastard. The weather was colder. Rupert Murdoch had bought Pravda. And Birdie’s notebooks arrived in the mail, neatly wrapped and tied, and they told me most of what I already knew and much more.

  That evening when I went to St Vincent’s, I looked down at Ricky’s pale face and saw a flicker of life. The doctors came, they shone a flashlight in Ricky’s eyes; there was some reaction. A miracle, said one of the nurses who was also a nun. I don’t believe in goddamn miracles, but I figured I’d take it.

  Outside Ricky’s room at St Vincent’s, I found Hillel Abramsky and some of his pals discussing Talmudic issues with a priest.

  “I
always liked your friend Ricky,” Hillel said. “I thought he could use a little extra help. We have good relations with St Vincent’s.”

  “You think your God lets you pray for guys like Ricky?”

  “And why not?” Hillel said. “By the way, Saroyan is a crook.”

  “I know that.”

  “You can pick him up any time.”

  “Thanks, Hilly. Thank you. We just did. How did you keep him from leaving? You held him hostage? You fed him stuffed derma? What?”

  Abramsky reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a baggie. Inside, wrapped in some tissue paper, was the diamond big as a walnut. “Without this, I knew he would never leave. Greedy schmuck. So I kept it in my pants. I sent him a message I was on a religious retreat. I could not be disturbed.”

  “You could have been a shrink, Hil.”

  “Thank you.”

  I walked away from the hospital and through the Village that Halloween night, through the cool fall streets that were jammed with witches and devils. I walked all the way to Broome Street where I sat at the bar alongside a Hillary Clinton in drag and a couple of ghosts. I didn’t have a costume.

  Halfway through my third Corona and a small mountain of fried onion rings, someone climbed up on the stool next to me. She smelled great.

  “Can I buy you one?” It was Lily Hanes.

  “You’ve been following me,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I’m harmless.”