Last Dance

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “I don’t understand Trump,” says Lenny, holding up a headline about Russians and Mueller. “Really, I don’t. I try, but Jesus.”

  “I told you not to.”

  “But he’s there all the time, fucking things up. The Russians have him, Sam. Putin owns him. Might never be proved, but it’s true.”

  I cut him a look.

  “All right,” he says, “no politics.” He wipes the bar. “Now that we’re changing topics, what’s up with the ballerina?”

  “Lenny . . .”

  “Still lost, I guess.”

  “Lenny.”

  He pours me another, loosens his bow tie, rolls up the sleeves of his white shirt. It’s near closing. How many nights have I watched Lenny cash out, take stock, and lock up? The soft rattle of glasses; the smoothing of bills, stacked by denomination; the whisk of a broom; and the slow dance of Lenny’s rag over oak. Back when I smoked, we’d share a cigarette out front as the last of the homeless wandered past us to boxes and tents over on Main and down toward San Pedro.

  “Guy came in the other day. Stoned. I mean, Sam, this guy was three-sheets blurry,” says Lenny. “Sat over there, half asleep, real pleasant buzz on his face, as if he had seen the divine. You know the look. Like an after-sex look but more relaxed.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “No. But I remember sex. Anyway, I’m thinking I should start smoking again. Just a little every now and then. Take the edge off. It’s legal now, so there’d be no problem with my previous conviction. Who would remember anyway, right? I did my time way back. What do you think?”

  “Why not?”

  “My thoughts too.”

  “How long have you been out here, Lenny?”

  “Decades.”

  “You miss New York?”

  “I get back now and then,” he says.

  “A lot of New Yorkers moving this way.”

  “Guy came in the other day from Flatbush. Thick accent. I thought he was an extra.”

  The door opens. A breeze runs through. Stefan Petrovic appears in the mirror next to me.

  “You’d be easy to kill, Sam,” says Stefan, wrapping his arm around me and sliding onto a stool. “Here every night.”

  “Not every, just most. You drinking?”

  “Bourbon, please.”

  Lenny pours and glides to the end of the bar with his paper.

  “What is it with bourbon?” I say.

  “It’s hip,” says Stefan. “Everybody likes.”

  He lifts his glass. Looks around. Checks the mirror, swivels back his shoulders, combs a hand through his black hair. He looks as if he just came from a workout and a steam. His suit, imported from an Argentine tailor he met in a card game in Milan, hangs sleek and fine. Chin strong, eyes deep set, he has the air of a minor prince, a man of charm who, at any minute, could disappear with your wallet, car keys, and wife.

  “Some fires up your way,” I say.

  “I hope not like last year. Malibu was hell last year, Sam. Almost lost my house.”

  “End-of-days sky. Nature is beautiful in her fury.”

  “You drunk?”

  “Nearly. You here to kill me?”

  Stefan points a finger gun at me and laughs.

  “No, I have news for you. I spoke to a friend in Russia. He told me things about your ballerina. Could be interesting.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Can’t say yet. Complicated. Maybe soon you make a trip with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere not close.”

  “That’s it?” I say.

  “For now.”

  Stefan looks at me, winks, waves to Lenny for another bourbon. I know not to push Stefan. After his parents were killed in Yugoslavia, he was shipped to Belgrade to live with his grandfather, Goran, a mandolin player who trafficked cigarettes and currencies and kept a big flat off the main square near the opera house, where he was visited nightly by a Macedonian soprano with legal problems who offered private arias in exchange for deutsche marks and a fake passport. This is the story Stefan tells. He has many such tales, and it is hard to know what is true and what is not. He’s a miniaturist. No detail or bit of color is too small or dismissive. I like that about him. People to him are recurring characters in real and make-believe stories never finished. I know the soprano wore fake diamonds, drank champagne, wept at Verdi, washed her stockings in the sink, and kept in her purse a small pistol that she once fired at a director. But I don’t know whether she got her passport and set alight for someplace new. When I ask him about her, he says, “Oh, yes, hers was an amusing end.”

  Goran took Stefan on smuggling trips across a disintegrating Yugoslavia. They wandered war ruins at night, and his grandfather told him, “Someone must put it back together but also create something new.” When Stefan was fourteen, Goran sent him to a French boarding school and later enrolled him at the Sorbonne, where Stefan studied finance, leaving Paris from time to time to join his grandfather, who by then traveled with an entourage that was heisting diamonds in Brussels, and paintings from German castles. “I am giving you two worlds,” said Goran. “One may not work out, so you will have the other. We in the Balkans know this. It is our blood.”

  Stefan spent years running guns but went straight—allegedly—when he started in finance and “growing money for people”—mostly deals in Europe and Asia. “Sam,” he told me once, “everybody is a crook, but you can make more money with the legal crooks.” There’s much I don’t know, much I don’t ask, about Stefan. Azadeh Nazari warns me about him. “The FBI has a file open on the guy, Carver,” Azadeh told me one afternoon at the Water Grill when Stefan strolled past with a Chinese developer. “Be careful.” I said, “He helped me out on a case.” “Because it benefited him,” she said. The case involved a banker who had hired an assassin to stage a burglary and kill his wife. Not too smart for a smart guy. A friend of a friend of Stefan’s knew the hit man. Stefan walked into the Little Easy one night and slipped me the killer’s name. “I don’t like this banker,” Stefan said. “This is good for you and me. Check the security cameras on the Santa Monica Promenade. Money exchanged there. Stupid, huh?” He laughed and walked out. The banker had used a burner phone to call the killer, but the killer recorded their conversations for eternal blackmail.

  “Two more, please,” says Stefan.

  Lenny pours.

  “I watched Katrina on YouTube,” says Stefan. “Unbelievable, really. Someone put together clips of her best performances. Like greatest hits. You can see her age. Just a little. YouTube is like that. When you watch it like that, time makes life short, you know, like all you have is a few minutes. Even the best people can be turned into a few minutes. It’s kind of sad, don’t you think?” He sighs. “I still remember her from the Weinstein party. I told you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You find out any more about her? She had many lovers, I think.”

  “We’re looking into everything. No good leads yet.”

  “Must have something.”

  “No.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Why ‘mmmm’?”

  He looks at me in the mirror, then away.

  “She danced at the party slow and lost, like child,” he says. “This is what I thought.”

  “You think this person you know can help?”

  “We’ll see. You look tired.”

  “A little.”

  Stefan sips.

  “Tell me about your father,” he says.

  “I don’t want to talk about that now. You know the story.”

  “Never found them, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Was he a good boxer?”

  “He won more than he lost,” I say.

  “But crazy, right? A little off.”


  “Yes. He was beaten to death in an alley.”

  “You were a boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your first case.”

  “I was a little young.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Never solved. They got away.”

  My long-dead father intrigues Stefan. The story reminds him of Yugoslavia—a bit of glamour and brutality that passed into history. He quizzes me sometimes on how my father looked in the morgue: battered, cut hands, face almost unrecognizable, pale-moon skin; the cool of the room, the scent of him, like acid and soap, and then the sheet falling back over him, and the sound of the tray rolling, the little door clicking shut. Stefan told me once that he and I were “two bruises.” He likes that analogy of sharing damage: murdered parents, and my mother, who I am a stranger to, gazing out a window in Boston. When I first told Stefan about my father, he enfolded me in his arms, and I felt how a refugee must feel when the burden of atrocity is lifted for a moment.

  “You driving back to Malibu?”

  “Why not?” he says.

  “You didn’t have too much?”

  “I am part Serb, Sam. There is never too much.”

  He stands, throws money on the bar. A big tip for Lenny. He steps behind me, puts his hands on my shoulders. We look at ourselves in the mirror. These gestures are important intimacies for Stefan. In the Balkans, he once told me, it was common for men and boys to touch, to be unafraid of affection, to hear a man’s breath. “You know, Sam, they might slit your throat two hours later, but in that second, you are their brother. American men don’t do this, I have noticed.” He pulls his hands away and disappears from the mirror. The door opens.

  “Call me about this trip,” I say.

  “Soon.”

  The door closes. The hipster lovers pay their bill. It’s Lenny and me. He flips to the sports pages. I walk to the upright piano and play, notes here and there, no structure, meandering like a voice looking for grammar. I close my eyes and see Katrina, as Stefan said, dancing and aging, every spin a year. I leave her suspended there and drift to a poor rendition of Art Tatum’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” I know the lines and pauses, the way the notes slide, shimmy, and run, but they are in my head, not my hands. I can’t gather them. I shift to another string of notes and see Dylan Cross. I ride them out a bit but don’t linger. I pull my hands back from the keys, and she is gone. I go to the bar, collect my notebook and pencil, and head for the door, feeling an ache in my legs and remembering Levon.

  “Hey!” yells Lenny. “Next time you see me, I might be a tad stoned.”

  Chapter 13

  It’s raining. I’m watching the streets shine black and reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I first read twenty years ago at Berkeley. I bought a copy the other day at the Last Book Store, on Fifth. The pages are stained with coffee and wine, and the cover—a sketch of a bridge over the Seine—is ripped and worn. The scent of age and dust fills me. A plane ticket and a sticky note fall out. The note has no name, message, or time, just a careless ink spiral in the corner. The name on the ticket is A. Riordan—no hint whether man or woman—who left Beirut on August 30 (no year) at 8:50 a.m. Bare clues to a mystery. I hold the evidence to the window and wonder about A. Riordan, their life, what they did, who called while they were out, and why the trip to London. I imagine A. Riordan was or may still be an archaeologist or a spy, someone solitary, clever. It’s a composite, a guess from traces left in fading numerals and letters. How did the book get to America? Into the Last Book Store? On that shelf? How many hands and lives had it passed through? I know more about A. Riordan than I do about whoever killed Katrina and Levon. Nothing to hold to the window. No scrap or trace of the doer, just an excess of drugs in the bloodstreams of unfortunate lives. I turn a page and read: Paris, cold and damp, bars, skiing, whiskey, horse races, poverty, betrayal, a young man writing stories far from home. And this sentence: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” Hemingway would have made a good cop.

  I put the book aside and call Ortiz.

  “Anything?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Think about what we have.”

  “How about what we don’t have. A body. Still nothing on who took it. Our guys came up clean. I don’t know what we’ve missed. We’ll have to go further back in employment records. One of those guys knew the layout of the morgue.” Ortiz sighs. “At least, we have Levon’s body. Enough heroin and fentanyl to kill a small army. But let’s go on the theory he wasn’t a user. We have no evidence anyone was there. No prints, motive. You know what the DA’s office will say: suicide or a rookie mistake by a novice junkie. Next.”

  “They were both killed.”

  “He says. How about some tangibles?”

  “‘Tangibles’? Have you been watching PBS again?”

  “Screw you,” says Ortiz. “What are you doing?”

  “Reading Hemingway.”

  “Christ.”

  “You?”

  “Fishing. We’re at the pier in Manhattan Beach.”

  “You don’t strike me as an angler. Hemingway fished, you know.”

  “I fished when I was a kid. My dad used to take us on a boat off Long Beach. Thought I’d try it again. It’s supposed to relax you.”

  “Isn’t it raining?”

  “Drizzle.”

  “Catch anything?”

  “Nibbles and stolen bait.” Wind in the phone. “Hang on.”

  I hear voices, the whine of a line being cast, caws.

  “Fucking seagulls,” says Ortiz. “I’m back. Hey, Carver, we gotta find Katrina’s diary and that woman—what was her name?—the one who picked up Levon that night.”

  “Zhanna Smirnov. That’s the name she checked in with at the Peninsula. She checked out the morning after we released Levon. What about the Russian consulate? Ask them about her.”

  “I will. They call every day wanting updates. I kicked them to the chief’s office, but I’ll check her name with them. Do we know for certain she’s a Russian citizen?”

  “We don’t. I’m going back to Katrina’s neighbor. Maybe he knows about the diary.”

  “The costume designer guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gotta go. Some asshole’s tangled in my line.”

  Click.

  Sunday afternoon. Gray. I use A. Riordan’s plane ticket as a bookmark. I make coffee, read my notes. I lift Katrina’s locket from my sacred inlaid box of stolen things. I lay it by the notebook and pencil, hoping something will connect, a strand however thin. Nothing. I put it back in the box near the other possessions: The ring from the kid who was running his mouth in a barbershop over on Tenth. Kid wouldn’t sit still. Wriggling in the chair, yapping. The barber snapped, pulled a .38 out of the scissor drawer. “I just wanted to shut that fucking boy up.” The rosary from Maria, hit coming out of church by a stray marked for someone else. She bled out on stairs bright with veils and first-communion dresses. That’s how lives end. Weeping, a priest’s vestments in the wind. You’re there, unaware, and suddenly the warmth of you is gone. It all goes still. I close the box. I run a bath, pour a drink, and soak; close my eyes as if I were floating in the sea, maybe off Lisbon or somewhere like that, somewhere in memory. Not Rhode Island, though—the water is cold there and the currents swift. I dry and call Maggie.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Sam. How are you?”

  “Fine. How are you guys?”

  “Your mother’s in her room. Looking out the window. Like always.”

  “At the birds.”

  “Counting.”

  “Has it gotten worse since I was there?”

  “Her body is more curled. She’s too thin but won’t eat. She doesn’t talk anymore, Sam. Just looks. She doesn’t know me most days. I’m her sister. I’m here with her every day, but
she doesn’t know me. I’ve lost her. They told us.”

  “Maybe it’s time . . .”

  “Not that, Sam. Never that. She’s staying with me. I can handle it. There’s a girl a few streets over. I don’t think you met her. She’s a nurse. Works over at St. Catherine’s. She comes by twice a week and helps me bathe your mom. She’s good company. She’s not married. We sit and have a beer after in the kitchen. Her name’s Susan. She’s been a godsend.”

  “It’s good you’re getting a little help. You need it, Maggie.”

  “Susan and I talk about all kinds of things. She’s very smart. We both like Nat Geo. In my day, it was National Geographic, but now it’s Nat Geo. They have a Twitter thing.”

  “I’ll come soon, and we’ll talk and have a beer.”

  “I’d like that, Sam.”

  I can imagine Maggie in her kitchen, her long, gray hippie hair. The rebel my mother wasn’t.

  “You want me to put the phone to her ear?”

  “Please.”

  “Hang on. Let me go upstairs.”

  I follow her in my mind. Through the living room, past the lace over the couch and the nautical map of Nantucket; past pictures of dead relatives, the most recent in color, the older ones, like my great-grandfather Mel, who worked all his life in a spindle factory, looking out half amused in fading black-and-white; up the stairs—twelve of them; the eighth one creaks—turning left down the hall to my mother’s room, through the door (I oiled the hinges on my last trip) and to the window where she sits wrapped in a blanket.

  “Okay, Sam. Here she is.”

  A silence I alone must fill.

  “Hi, Mom. It’s Sam. Your son.”

  I hear a single long breath. I tell her I’ll be there soon. I promise. I talk about our trips to the beach when I was a boy and how she watched me from the shore. On the way home, we’d stop for fried clams at a shack along the rocks, and it was just the two of us—my father then was running and punching air, a boxer with his own rhythms—and after we ate, we’d drive home, our skin red and warm, and we’d change and walk down the street for ice cream. It was a time before I knew I would have a life beyond her. She would tell stories as we walked home in the dark, wondering if my father would be there, the wild man she loved, the only one who could tip him straight. For a time. She doesn’t know me now, but maybe she remembers far-back things. The doctor told Maggie and me that pieces of the past live inside, rising, flashing, unexpected. I call every week, and we go through time. She was a teacher. She wrote short stories, had a few of them published. She drove an old Saab, loved Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley, went to church when no one was there, and lit all the candles and sat in the light against the statues and Stations of the Cross. I was her only child.