Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  Which meant he was ready to cop a plea.

  It was snowing outside by the time Assistant District Attorney Nellie Brand got to the Eighty-seventh Precinct. She felt cold and bedraggled even though she looked toasty warm and well-tailored in a brown suit, brown leather boots, a beige blouse, and a green headband that complemented, and complimented, her blue eyes and sand-colored hair.

  She’d had an argument with her husband before leaving for work this morning, and her manner—even with detectives she knew as well as those from the Eight-Seven—was unusually brusque. She knew Moscowitz, too, had in fact lost a court case to him not six months ago. Altogether, her mood did not bode well for Lorenzo Schiavinato, who looked too handsome by half and who had, by his own admission to his attorney, pumped two slugs into a little old lady. Nellie had already been briefed. An interpreter translating, she began the Q and A with the usual name/address/occupation bullshit, and then eased into a routine she’d followed a hundred times before. A thousand times. It was exactly 11:04 a.m.

  Q: So tell me, sir, how long did you know the murdered woman?

  Carella noticed that Nellie, too, had avoided using Schiavinato’s name. He figured if the man ever got out of jail, he should change it to Skeever or something. But it also occurred to him that Nellie had called Svetlana Dyalovich “the murdered woman,” and wondered if she was having difficulty pronouncing her name, too. Maybe everyone in the world should change his name, he thought, and missed part of Lorenzo’s reply.

  A: … at the fish market.

  Q: Would this be the Lincoln Street Fish Market?

  A: Yes. Where I work.

  Q: And that’s where you first met her?

  A: Yes.

  Q: When was this?

  A: The middle of September.

  Q: This past September.

  A: Yes.

  Q: So you’ve know her approximately four months. A bit more than four months.

  A: Yes.

  Q: Were you ever in her apartment on Lincoln Street?

  A: Yes.

  Q: 1217 Lincoln Street?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Apartment 3A?

  A: Yes.

  Q: When were you there?

  A: Twice.

  Q: When?

  A: The first time to deliver fish for her cat. Svetlana was sick, she called the market …

  Q: You called her Svetlana, did you?

  A: Yes. That was her name.

  Q: And that’s what you called her.

  A: We were friends.

  Q: Did you visit your friend in her apartment on the night of January 20, two days ago?

  A: I did.

  Q: To deliver fish again?

  A: No.

  Q: Why were you there, sir?

  A: To kill her.

  Q: Did you, in fact, kill her?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Why?

  A: To save her.

  The way Lorenzo tells it, Svetlana is a nice old lady who comes to the market every morning to buy fresh fish for her cat, telling him every day—in almost perfect Italian …

  Mica, lei parla Italiano bene.

  Solo un pocotino.

  No, no, molto bene.

  Congratulating her on the way she speaks his native tongue, she shyly denying her facility with the language, telling him she needs …

  Mi bisogna un po di pesce fresco per il mio gatto …

  … fresh fish for her cat every day, two fish a day, one in the morning, one at night. She feeds him only twice a day, but the fish must be absolutely fresh “because my Irina is very fussy,” she says in Italian, with a girlish wink that tells him she must once have been a very beautiful woman. Even at her age, there is still something elegant about the way she walks, a long graceful stride, as if she is crossing a stage; he wonders sometimes if perhaps she was once an actress.

  He first realizes she is in constant pain when, one early morning at the fish market, she can scarcely open her handbag to pay for her purchase. This is still September, and the weather is mild and sunny, but she is struggling nonetheless with the catch on the bag, and he notices for the first time the gnarled hands and twisted fingers.

  She is having such difficulty with the catch on her bag that the pain contorts her face and she turns away from him in embarrassment, continuing her struggle in silence, her back turned to him. When at last she frees the stubborn interlocking metal pieces, she turns to him and he sees that tears are running down her face as she hands him the several dollars for the two fish.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Puoi alzare la voce?” she asks. “Sono un po sordo.”

  Asking him to speak a little louder as she is a little deaf.

  He repeats the question, and she answers, in Italian, “Yes, fine, I’m fine.”

  He learns one day, early in October, that she is originally from Russia and at once a stronger bond is forged, these two immigrants in a city of immigrants, he an Italian seller of fish, thirty-four years old and adrift in a foreign land, she a Russian expatriate in her eighties, a former actress, perhaps, or dancer perhaps, or perhaps even a princess, who knows, seeking fresh seafood for “mio piccolo tesoro Irina.”

  My little treasure Irina.

  She reminds him somehow of his gentle and cultivated Aunt Lucia who married a greengrocer from Napoli when Lorenzo was only twelve, breaking his heart when she moved to that beautiful but barbaric city so very far to the south.

  Their daily exchanges are no longer than ten or fifteen minutes each, but during this time they each learn much about the other, and he finds that he looks forward to her early morning visits to the market, a pretty silk scarf on her head now that winter is approaching, woolen gloves on her twisted hands, a worn blue woolen coat, he senses she was once a woman of elegance and taste who has now fallen upon hard times here in this harsh city.

  One day he tells her why he left Milano.

  “I am a gambler,” he says. “I owed money.”

  “Ah,” she says, and nods wisely.

  “A lot of money. They threatened to kill me. In Italy, this is not an idle threat. I left.”

  “Do you still gamble?” she asks.

  “Ehh,” he says, and shrugs, and smiles ruefully, saying with the slight lifting of his shoulders and the faint grin, Yes, signora, every now and then, che posso fare? “And you?” he asks. “Do you have any bad habits?”

  “I listen to old records,” she says.

  A week or so later, he learns that she once played piano on the concert stage, often performing at La Scala in Milan, which is where she learned Italian …

  “But no! La Scala? Veramente?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Excitedly.

  “Not only in Milan,” she says, “but also in New York and London and Paris …”

  “Brava,” he says.

  “… Budapest, Vienna, Anvers, Prague, Liège, Brussels, everywhere. Everywhere.”

  Her voice falling.

  “Bravissima,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says softly.

  They are silent for a moment. He is wrapping the fish he recommended to her. “And now?” he says. “Do you still play?”

  “Now,” she says, “I listen to the past.”

  Just before Thanksgiving, she comes to the market one morning and tells Lorenzo she had been to see her ear doctor yesterday and he made some tests …

  “Audiometric tests,” she says. “Non so il parole Italiano …”

  … she doesn’t know the Italian word for the tests, they reproduce various sounds in each ear. The results weren’t good, she tells him, and now she is fearful there may be something else wrong. She has lately begun to hear ringing in her ears, she is afraid …

  Lorenzo tells her that tests aren’t always accurate, and doctors often make mistakes, they think they’re God, they think they can play with a person’s emotions, but she keeps shaking her head and saying she knows the tests were correct, her hearing is getting worse and worse ever
y day of the week. What if there comes a time when she can no longer listen to her own recordings? Then even the past will be gone. And then she might just as well be dead.

  It is not until he delivers the fish to her, on the morning she got sick …

  Q: What do you mean, sick?

  A: Nothing serious. A cold. Although, for an old woman …

  Q: When was this?

  A: The beginning of the month.

  Q: This month? January?

  A: Yes.

  Q: How’d you know she was sick?

  A: She telephoned me. Lorenzo, non mi sento tanto bene oggi. Me lo puoi portare i pesci?

  Q: Phoned you at the market?

  A: Yes. And asked me if I could please pick out two nice fresh fish for Irina, same as always, and deliver them to the apartment. I told her I would. She was a friend. I got there …

  At eight-thirty that January morning, there is no one in the hallway when Lorenzo knocks on the door to apartment 3A. But just as Svetlana calls, “Yes, who is it?” the door to apartment 3C opens, and an exotic-looking woman with long black hair and dark brown eyes, and a mouth like Sophia Loren’s, and high cheekbones and wonderful …

  Q: What about her?

  A: She was coming out of the apartment.

  Q: 3C, did you say?

  A: Down the hall.

  Q: So what about her?

  A: Nothing. I’m giving you all the details.

  He tells Svetlana through the closed door that it’s him, Lorenzo, and he’s here with the fish for Irina. She calls to him to come in, the door is open. The girl from 3C has already gone down the stairs. Lorenzo goes into the apartment. It is a small apartment and frightfully cold on this day when winter has scarcely begun in earnest. Svetlana is sitting up in a double bed in the tiny bedroom, wearing a faded pink silk robe, covered with a blanket and a quilt that looks almost Italian. There is a dresser that is almost certainly Italian, or so he believes, like one you might find on Sicilia or Sardegna, with ornate drawer pulls and paintings on the sides and top.

  “C’ho un mal raffredore,” she says, telling him she has a bad cold, and then gently warning him not to come near her, “Non ti avvicinare.”

  Irina the cat is lying at the foot of the bed. She is a fat gray and black and white animal. She blinks up at Lorenzo as he comes into the room, and then catches the scent of the fresh fish wrapped in white paper, and is suddenly all upright ears and flashing green eyes and twitching nose. Like a jungle beast, Lorenzo thinks.

  Svetlana asks if he would mind feeding Irina one of the fish. He needn’t do anything but put it in Irina’s bowl under the sink; Irina eats everything but the spine and the hard part of the jaw. Lorenzo goes out to the kitchen, unwraps the fish while the cat rubs against his leg. There is something about cats that makes him enormously uncomfortable. He never knows what a cat is thinking. He never knows whether a cat is going to lick his hand or spring for his throat. He puts the raw fish in the cat’s bowl and backs away at once.

  When he comes back into the bedroom, Svetlana asks him to sit for a moment, please, there is something she would like to discuss with him. He takes a chair near the dresser. Across the room, he can see into an open closet where old but stylish clothes, tattered and frayed, are hanging on silk-covered hangers the color of Svetlana’s robe. She coughs, takes a Kleenex from a box beside the bed, blows her nose, and then says, “Lorenzo, voglio che tu mi ammazi.”

  “Lorenzo, I want you to kill me.”

  14

  He does not at first know how to react to this. Is this some sort of Russian joke? If so, Slavs have a very peculiar sense of humor. But is he supposed to laugh? No, she seems quite serious. She wants him to kill her. She would do it herself, she says, but she doesn’t have the nerve. Besides, how does a person kill herself if she doesn’t own a gun? Does she jump off the roof? Or turn on the gas? Or slit her wrists with a razor or a knife? Or hang herself from the closet pole? No, all of these seem too horrible even to contemplate. A gun is swift and sure, but where would she get a gun? Does Lorenzo know where to get a gun? And if he can get one, would he be so kind as to shoot her?

  She is not smiling.

  This is no joke.

  In the kitchen, he can hear the cat demolishing the fish Lorenzo put in her bowl. The sounds are somehow obscene. Cats are too much like wild animals. One step backward and they would be in the jungle again, hunting.

  Svetlana goes on to explain that she has been to see a neurologist who diagnosed a benign tumor on the nerve in her left auditory canal. Unless this is removed surgically, she will go completely deaf in that ear. But the chances of …

  “Well, then of course you must …”

  “No,” she says, “you don’t understand. Even if I elect surgery … this is what they say, Lorenzo, as if I would be electing a president, elect surgery, can you imagine? Even if I were to choose surgery, agree to surgery, even then …”

  She shakes her head.

  “I’ve waited too long, Lorenzo. The tumor is very large, they may not be able to save my hearing. The larger the tumor, the smaller the chance, is what he told me. The doctor. And with … with anything larger than three centimeters in diameter … with any tumor larger than that …”

  And here she begins weeping.

  “They might not … be … be able to save my facial nerves, either. Is what he told me. The doctor.”

  Lorenzo stands helplessly beside the bed.

  “So what’s the use? My hands are already dead, I can’t play anymore. Should I now choose to live without being able to hear? Without being able to express feeling on my face? Whenever I played, my hands and my face said all there was to say. Do you know what they called me? A tornado. A tornado from the Steppes. A wild tornado. My face and my hands. A tornado.”

  Sobbing bitterly, the words coming out brokenly …

  “What’s left for me, Lorenzo? What? Why should I choose to live? Please help me.”

  Her hands covering her face, crying into them.

  “Please,” she begs. “Kill me. Please.”

  He tells her this is absurd.

  He tells her that in any case, however slender the chances of success, she must undertake surgery, of course she must. Besides, a person shouldn’t make decisions when she isn’t feeling right, she’s sick just now …

  “See how pale you look!”

  … she’ll feel different about all this when her cold is gone. But she keeps shaking her head as he talks, no, no, no, insisting that she’s given this a great deal of thought, truly, and he would really be doing her an enormous service if he would only find a gun and kill her.

  “You’re serious,” he says.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Svetlana,” he says, “no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re friends. You’re my friend, Svetlana.”

  “Then kill me,” she says.

  “No.”

  “Please, Lorenzo. Kill me. Take me out of my misery. Help me. Please!”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”

  “No.”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “No.”

  “Lorenzo, please. Please.”

  “No, Svetlana. I’m sorry, no.”

  “Twenty-five. To kill me and to take care of Irina afterward. Take her home with you, feed her, care for her.”

  “I can’t. I won’t.”

  “I would pay you more, but …”

  “No, Svetlana. Please. Never. Not even for a million. Never. Please.”

  But that is before he loses the money to Bernie the Banker.

  What Bernie is telling him, if he correctly understands his very rapid English, is that he is going to kill Lorenzo unless he comes up with the money he owes by Sunday morning. Bernie is a Jew, he supposes, but he is beginning to sound very Ital
ian with all this talk about swimming with the little fishes, very Italian indeed. Lorenzo has dealt with enough bookmakers, both Italian and American, to know that very often they won’t necessarily kill you because then they will never get the money you owe them. On the other hand, having your legs broken or an eye put out is not a very cheerful prospect, either. He listens quite solemnly to what the little bookie is telling him, never doubting for a moment that Bernie himself or someone Bernie knows will hurt him very badly if he doesn’t come up with the twenty thousand dollars he bet on those fucking Steelers, what are Steelers anyway, people who steal? The English language is sometimes mystifying to him, but he sure as hell understands what Bernie is telling him now. Bernie is saying “Pay me by Sunday morning, my friend, or you may have cause to be very sorry.”

  Is what Bernie is saying.

  Which is when he calls Svetlana to say that if she still wants him to do what she proposed earlier this month …

  “Yes,” she says at once.

  “Then I’m ready to do it,” he whispers into the phone.

  “When?” she whispers.

  Both of them whispering in Italian like the conspirators they are.

  “Now,” he says. “Tonight.”

  “No. I have some things to do first.”

  “Then when?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, all right,” he says. “Tomorrow night.”

  All of this in Italian.

  Domani sera?

  Sì, va bene. Domani sera.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.

  “Good. Call me. But not in the morning. I’ll be out in the morning. I have some business to take care of.”

  “Then when?”

  “Early afternoon.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Ciao,” she says.

  “Ciao.”

  Two old pals signing off. No mention at all of murder.

  It is a little before eleven when he arrives at her apartment that Saturday night. She is wearing a flowered cotton house-dress and scuffed French-heeled shoes. She tells him she went to the bank this morning to withdraw the money she promised him …

  “I hate to take money for this,” he says.

  “I would not expect …”