Last Dance

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  I flash my shield.

  “I haven’t done anything illicit; I assure you. I’ve been working nonstop on our ballet. Giselle. Do you know it?”

  “Brokenhearted girl dies and is resurrected by virgin spirits.”

  “Close enough. How may I help you?” He looks at me, quite pleased with himself.

  “When did you last see Katrina Ivanovna?”

  “Our Giselle,” he says. “We had a rehearsal yesterday afternoon. Ended about four. She left in one of her moods. Volatile temperament, that girl. Worse than most. Very difficult. The great ones are, of course.” He takes a breath. “She’s aged, you know. Can’t do what she once did. That’s confidential, mind you. They say that about me too. She and I took this on to prove we could still do the things we did back when everyone wanted us. She’s lovely but, as I said, quite difficult. Has she done something?”

  “She’s dead.”

  His eyes narrow. He turns his head toward me, swallows, looks down, then out to the dark theater. He takes a step back, steadies himself on the chair, lifts a hand to his lips, closes his eyes hard. The lines of his face pull tight, and as with so many who are given such news, words, for a moment, escape him. Tears run; seconds pass.

  “Oh, dear,” he says. “Was it an overdose? She had been taking pills. She was in great pain much of the time.” He wipes the corner of his eye with a finger. “The body is fallible to the dream. She used to say that. I think she picked it up from an old teacher. This is not right, this news you’re giving me, Detective. How?”

  “We’re looking at everything. There were pills and vodka. We’re not sure yet. We found her alone in a loft over on Spring.”

  “She bought it years ago when real estate was cheap downtown.”

  “So you last saw her around four p.m.?”

  “She walked across this stage, did a clumsy pirouette just to goad me, and left out the backstage door.”

  “Did she leave with anyone?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Was she close to anybody in the company?”

  “Not really. She was brought in to dance this part. She’s not part of our troupe. The dancers will be here later, if you wish to talk to them.”

  “I do. Did she seem upset or preoccupied? Anything bothering her?”

  “She was losing her talent, Detective. That upset her very much. She still had enough to occasionally dazzle, but the sharpness was blurring.”

  “Was she close to a cellist?”

  “Detective,” he sighs, “she was close to cellists, oboists, violinists, maestros, and, when the mood struck her, ushers and set designers. Men or women. It didn’t matter. She had a ravenous nature.”

  “With you?”

  “Oh my, you are direct. Once or twice over the years. Not recent.”

  “A neighbor said a cellist came to her loft and played while she danced.”

  “As I said, she knew many musicians. I don’t know who this cellist could have been.”

  Andreas Stein sits down and squints in the spotlight. Says nothing. He rises and slides the chair into the darkness. He wipes his eyes and tells me when he first saw her, years ago in Paris: how she moved, the flare of her grand jeté, the grace of her adagio, the fine line of her neck, her slender jaw, delicate as spider’s thread, and how they went out for drinks after rehearsals—she drank Campari then—and walked the cobblestones until morning, confident and amazed of what was in them, their gifts that demanded everything but rewarded them with the indelible lie of beauty, and how after the last performance, they couldn’t sleep, so they wandered again through the city and ate bread and jam for breakfast and watched the boats on the Seine and the way the morning light slipped over the steeples and into the gardens and through the mist of fountains. He will never have that again. I have just met him, but I can tell he never will. He is living on embers. He looks at me, embarrassed, as if he has committed a sacrilege to memory. But I know how he feels, how it all can seem so splendid and useless.

  “We’ve lost our Giselle,” he says, staring into the empty seats. “What will we do?”

  Chapter 4

  I call the medical examiner’s office. No answer. The crime lab is backed up and won’t get to Katrina Ivanovna’s phone and laptop until tomorrow. “It’s the weekend, Carver, you know how it is,” says the curt voice when I call. Some asshole a year from his pension. There’s no security video from her building. Ballerinas from Stein’s company offered little except to say that Katrina kept to herself and was often in a haze—until she danced and, as one of them said, “became this wonderful thing.”

  I head to Malibu to see Stefan Petrovic, a one-time gunrunner and drug smuggler turned art dealer and global financier. Stefan has long intrigued the feds but has never been arrested. “I have the best lawyers, Sam, but truly, what have I done?” He helped me on a case years ago after I made detective. He appeared at the Little Easy, sat beside me, slid a slip of paper toward my drink, and left. He has become an occasional drinking partner and off-the-books confidential informant. I have told him that I’d arrest him if he broke any laws in my jurisdiction. “How incestuous it all is, don’t you think, Sam?” he said once while ordering martinis at the Biltmore and waiting for a performance artist (that’s who he told me she was) from Prague. “The line is not so straight between good and bad, no?”

  The air cools with the night, and by the time I hit the coastal highway, the full moon is bright over the ocean. Planes lift like dark angels from LAX, and the last of the surf boys are peeling off wet suits near cars parked on the roadside, their dope sweet on the breeze. I curve north. Santa Monica falls away in my rearview. I slide in a Balkan CD Stefan gave me—fast-moving Romani music spliced with dirges that bring to mind broken furniture and regret. The music is sly like Stefan. He was born in the mountains north of Sarajevo, the only son of a Serbian father and a Muslim mother. His parents were killed by each other’s tribe in a war I remember watching on TV as a boy. Markets spattered with blood and shattered fruit, men marched along rivers, girls raped and shot in fields and forests. It was distant and exotic: mosques and churches, red-tile roofs, tanks aflame, orchards, and old ladies running with groceries and dodging sniper fire on the fringe of Europe.

  I wind up a hill and stop at Stefan’s gate. Luksala, an African Stefan saved from some unending genocide, buzzes me in. The eighteenth-century Belgrade-style villa is dark. The front door is open. It feels as if guests have fled a party. Luksala whispers, “Mr. Stefan no good tonight. Sitting out back by himself, drinking. Drinking all day. Anniversary of mother’s death. He like this every year. Come.”

  He leads me through the foyer and living room, out to the back patio, past the pool, and to the grass, where Stefan sits in an Adirondack chair, staring at the ocean, his white robe aglow.

  “Sam, how are you? It’s been a while.”

  He crosses his legs and lights a cigar.

  “You’re out of your neighborhood, Detective,” he says, waving me to sit beside him. “I told you, though, I’ve gone respectable.”

  “It’s not a good time. I’ll come back.”

  “Stay. You must have a case.”

  Distant boats and a few tankers slide past in the moonlight.

  “Do you know the ballerina Katrina Ivanovna?”

  He looks up as if deciphering the night sky.

  “I met her once at a Harvey Weinstein party. Before all that shit came out about Harvey. When he had power and people were scared of him. I used to set him up with money guys for his movies. Harvey was always looking for money. He was a scavenger dog.” Stefan blows a plume of gray. “Katrina Ivanovna danced at the party. Everyone watched. I still remember. A piano played and she moved like a tiny creature from a fairy tale. Does that make sense? I had never gone to the ballet. But that night, I thought I might start.” He looks in his glass and then to the sea. “I tol
d her how good she was. We talked a little, and she disappeared through the crowd.”

  “She’s dead,” I say. “We don’t know if it’s an overdose or if she’s been killed. Pills and vodka, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  He shakes his head, brushes ash from his robe.

  “Who would kill . . .” His voice drops. He pinches the bridge of his nose, sits quietly. He looks at me, then away. His eyes are bloodshot, but they are for his mother and from a long night of drink. “Katrina Ivanovna,” he says. The name hushes in the air. He starts to say something but stops. He hands me a glass and a bottle of bourbon. He offers a cigar.

  “I quit smoking,” I say.

  “I’m quitting tomorrow,” says Stefan. “You think I might know something?”

  “A famous Russian ballerina dies. You travel in certain circles. She arrived in LA a few weeks ago to rehearse for Giselle.”

  “I’ve heard nothing,” he says. “Could be too many pills. You read it all the time. This country is a big medicine cabinet.” He puffs. “Russians, though, huh? Stealing your election. Poisoning spies and dissidents in Europe. They are busy people, the Russians. When did it happen?”

  “She was found this morning. Why do you think she danced at Weinstein’s party?”

  “I don’t know. That was years ago. Maybe she thought she’d get into a movie. Harvey was a man of promises.”

  “You think . . .”

  “No, Sam, she wasn’t Harvey’s type.”

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “Is he in jail yet?”

  “He’s in New York, facing all kinds of charges.”

  Stefan leans back and takes a long sip.

  “That night at the party, I wanted to reach out and touch her. To see what she felt like, you know, like a little girl and a woman in the same body.” He glances toward me but doesn’t wait for an answer. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. Serbs and Russians are alike, Sam. We are, how to say, dark and misunderstood. Yes? It’s in our books and histories. We are brooders and fatalists. A little like you, Sam.”

  We sit in silence. A gust shoots along the coast; the air goes calm again. Below, all is quiet. Faraway lights move here and there as if the world had turned to another part of itself and left us alone at the ocean’s edge. I breathe in. A shiver runs through me, a recognition of those moments that, over the years, gather unknown inside you, appearing from time to time like a heaven of misplaced stars.

  “How’s your mother, Sam? Still bad?”

  “She doesn’t know me anymore. Her mind is gone.”

  “In Boston?”

  “With my aunt. I need to get back there soon.”

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me, but may I ask, does it feel like she’s dead?”

  “It feels like she’s hiding in a place I cannot reach.”

  “That may be worse.”

  Stefan recrosses his legs, wipes the corner of his eye.

  “My mother used to get up before it was light,” he says. “Our house was near a stream. We had a raised, open porch. A deck, I think you call them here. She would sit with a coffee and a cigarette—she was a European Muslim, not a Middle Eastern Muslim, so cigarettes were permitted—and all the world did not move, except the stream. Did you ever listen to a stream? It’s hypnotic. One morning when I was little, I went out and sat on her lap. She sang an old Balkan song about a king and his lover. Then she stopped and said, ‘This is my favorite time. See how the trees step out of the darkness.’ We watched together as it became light. We left the porch and woke my father. He drank a lot of plum brandy but was a good man. He was a surveyor. I think I told you that before. He was not a lunatic nationalist like so many Serbs. When the war came, we thought we’d be no part of it. But it found us.”

  The cigar ember lights his face. The moon is high, incandescent; you can count its countries.

  “Muslims from a village in the valley came one night and took my father. I never saw him again. Two days later, Serbs who once ate in our house and danced at our parties came for my mother. You would not have believed it then, Sam. Killing became the only way.” He lets a long while pass. “I was asleep. They tied her to a tree. I hope that she blocked it out by listening to the stream, but I don’t know. They shot her and went away. I cut her down. I washed her in the stream and buried her. I took my father’s gun and went down the road. I killed the first Serb I saw. I didn’t even know who. I emptied the gun on him. I threw it down and ran into the mountains.”

  He crushes out his cigar.

  “I felt hate but also a boy’s thrill at the power in my hand. I can’t explain what it was, but the feeling was over when the gun emptied. All I remember of that day, really, was washing my mother, and the blood running from her and into the stream. She would have liked that. To be part of the stream and carried to the sea. I dug a grave so that if you saw it from the sky, you would think that God had made it.”

  I turn toward him.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, Sam, fine. Those times stay deep, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  I hear him sip.

  “I can still see her dancing,” he says.

  “Your mother?”

  “No, Sam. Katrina.”

  “Made an impression.”

  “Some . . .”

  His words trail off. We sit a bit longer. Stefan finishes the bottle and falls asleep. Luksala comes to rouse him, but it is no use. Stefan is lost to the drink and the night and the tragedies that have made him. I stand.

  Luksala takes my seat. “I stay with Mr. Stefan. In a few hours, light.”

  I head to my car and back to the city. The highway’s almost empty. LA is quiet, so unlike itself, except to those who cannot sleep, who know that this is the true city: a metropolis of spirits and distant lights, a cool, dark place of lies that spin along the coast and blow across the desert. I get off the 110 at Fourth Street and park. No one’s in the lobby; the security guard is on his rounds. I take the elevator to my apartment, pour a drink, sit at the piano, and pull out Katrina Ivanovna’s locket. I hold it to the light and, with one hand, play a soft, meandering tune of the kind I imagine she may have danced to with the cellist. I’m not a very good pianist, but I have these compositions in my head, unrefined lines that rise and lose themselves. I stop and put the locket in the inlaid box that holds belongings of all my vics: tooth, business card, newspaper clipping, rosary, quarter, key, photograph—mementos that tell me the dead were once here among the living. From a tiny piece, you can trace a life, its yearnings and failures, its sublimities and its empty hours. I shower and sit by the window with one more drink. Esmeralda is not there tonight. She’s getting weaker and might be in a shelter, although she hates them, the way they crowd in on her, dispossessed eyes wanting to steal her things and take her soul. That’s what she says. The sidewalk is not the same without her shopping cart and clutter of possessions. I open my laptop and click to a photograph of Katrina Ivanovna, looking out from the wings of a theater in Budapest years ago, her hair pulled tight, her face poised, expectant, waiting to dance into the light. I push the laptop aside and sit in darkness, thinking of my mother, who no longer knows me, this woman who bore me and gave me a name and ran with me when I was a boy, across the coves and beaches of New England.

  Chapter 5

  I open my eyes. I’m in the chair. Day is on me. My head hurts. Horns, voices, the whine of a bus, clack of a skateboard, girls laughing. Midmorning. I stand, undress, and head to the shower, glimpsing myself in the mirror, disheveled and in need of a shave and a haircut. I look closer. A few threads of gray stretch back from the temple. I imagine how I might age, incrementally and then suddenly, the lines deepening, the hard cut of the face softening, the skin paling—a washed-out me with a ghost inside pushing out. I smile at the inevitability of it and summon a less-than-inspired defiance. I
swallow three aspirin. It’s been a rough, lost time lately, but I’ve known it before, although now, after Dylan Cross, the scrambled pieces don’t go back so easily anymore. I feel like a painting where shadows shift unexpectedly. Screw it. I face the hot water and baptize myself for a new day. I wrap a towel around me and head to the stove and French press. I throw away the empty scotch bottle, open the kitchen blinds, water the plant I have killed, notice the suitcase I haven’t unpacked, and check my phone: twenty-three missed calls from Ortiz.

  “Hey.”

  “Don’t fucking ‘hey’ me, Carver.”

  “Sorry, phone was off. I’m still a little jet lagged. Listen, I . . .”

  “We’re in a shit storm.”

  “What?”

  “The ballerina’s gone,” he says.

  “Gone?”

  “Fucking gone.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “She’s gone too. Kidnapped from the morgue.”

  “How?”

  “Middle of the freaking night. Three thirteen a.m. Two cars explode in the parking lot. Everyone runs, doors opening, chaos, lights flicking. All kinds of batshit. Total breakdown in security.” Ortiz is breathing, and I know he’s smoothing his mustache the way he does when he’s anxious and pissed. “Two guys dressed like morgue drivers and wearing pulled-low ball caps sneak in, slide her out of the tray, and put her in a bag. Disappear. Real quick and smooth. I’m looking at the video now. Amazing. So ballsy, it worked. I mean, who would have thought of someone stealing a stiff? Everyone’s thinking terror attack or some shit. It’s bad, Carver.”

  “But . . .”

  “It gets worse,” says Ortiz. “It was the weekend, right? Busy weekend. A lot of bodies, short staff. So . . .”

  “No.”

  “Yup. They never examined her. No autopsy. No nothing.”

  “No cause of death.”

  “Bingo. Don’t know if she’s a homicide, suicide, OD, or what.”