october 15: I always felt it was a lie. But now Mommy tells me. She is queen of lies. My father is not father. Mikhail Orlov is father. He and Mommy were lovers when he was young spy and she linguistics student. They had flat in Moscow. They went to movies. They drank vodka in hidden clubs and got tickets to Bolshoi. “Like normal,” Mommy says. What is normal? This lie she has kept. She says I need to know. She can keep secret no longer. My father who is not my father knows. Poor Anton. He has known all along. “That’s why he’s always at the dacha,” Mommy says. “He is good, but weak man. The state knew this. That is why he was only KGB analyst. Mikhail was strong. State knew this too. He was man they wanted. They did not want me with him and . . .” Mommy never cries. Not when I slipped and fell in Cinderella, and the critics were mean. Not when her brother died. Not at freedom. But she cried when she told me of Mikhail. The state released him into world. Mommy says this like he is bird and state is God. “Yes,” she says, “back then this was so.” He went to East Germany then to Paris, Brussels, and Madrid. To spy on world. I was inside her then. He didn’t know. Mommy kept me and married Anton, who is like Joseph in Bible. A good man with another man’s child. I cry. To know this. Mikhail doesn’t know he is my father. But he is spy. He might know all secrets. Or maybe does not want to know. Mommy says no. He does not know. She saw him one time in St. Petersburg. I was five. She didn’t tell him. She said she wanted to but then saw in his eyes that he was not same Mikhail. He hugged her. They had coffee. But Mikhail had other life. Mommy too. “Such love we had once,” Mommy says. Mommy is worried. It is dangerous in Moscow. The oligarchs and Putin people are angry. Sanctions won’t go away. Russia inside is bad. No trust. People poisoned. “One day,” Mommy says, “someone is there, next day not.” Like Moscow dogs in winter. Mommy thinks maybe she is on wrong side. She still has Gazprom job. Knows many people. Mommy is smart with people. She is like snake charmer. Suly told me this, but he didn’t have to. I already knew. But people are changing. Then Mommy says, like mommy I know: “And famous ballerina daughter not so famous anymore, or famous for wrong thing.” She says this like when I was young and did a clumsy petit battement. Mommy tells me about Mikhail because if something happens, I will need friend. I ask what will happen. Mommy doesn’t say. She looks away. She says he might not want to know me. To expect this. But there is nobody else. She is hoping, that is all. Mikhail used to love ballet. This is what she says. He must have seen me then. Before. When I was something to see. I wonder what he thought. Did he think I might be his? Did some quiet thing move in him? Mommy wanted Mikhail but only got me. She made me great ballerina. But that is all. I know this now. Maybe Mikhail will give me money and tell me to go away. How can he be father to daughter already grown? Maybe, I invite him to Giselle. See me in my last performance. The girl he made. I am angry. Confused.
Before Mommy left, she gave me folder and stood by window staring at the gray, black, and gold of St. Petersburg. I opened the folder and read. Pages and pages. Mikhail Orlov, my father, is man behind the American election stealing. The papers tell of network. Facebook. Fake news. Racism. White fear. Immigration. Anger. The papers say all this and more, and how Mikhail reached into America and played it like magician. Putin knew. He and Mikhail talked all the time. They met in Milan. They met many places Putin traveled. But no one ever saw Mikhail. Mommy says he is like space between dark and light, gone before one becomes the other. Trump is fool. This is what papers say. They are written like communiqués from former times. The words I read had no feeling. Mommy says this is common. We smoked cigarettes and looked at river. The cold is coming. The leaves are almost gone. Wet and fallen. I cried. Not because Mikhail is great spy. I don’t care about such things. The Americans do the same. It is game. But Mommy says be careful. Spies are everywhere. They follow me too. This person I’ve become. There is folder on me somewhere. Mommy says this. Mommy says things might turn bad for Mikhail. Americans watch him. Moscow watches him. They all might know—even though I didn’t know!!!!—that I am his daughter. Mommy says this could be trouble. The file is protection. “To have but only use like parachute.” Mommy looked at me to know I understood. I did. But who could understand such a thing? I took two pills. Mommy stayed, pretending, I think, that she loved me. I awoke at night. She was gone. I am writing a new story for diary. One day, I will turn it into memoir about what happened to great ballerina. Maybe it will be movie. Who will play me? Who could ever? Ha. Mommy told me to keep file on Mikhail. Hide it well. No one must know.
october 16: Zhanna came to room early. I feel like girl in fairy tale, roses all around and witches. Ha ha. Zhanna is the good witch. I love her, like I loved Suly. She knows more people than Mommy, but Zhanna is more quiet. A better sphinx. This is what Suly said. I wish he was here. I miss him. I will visit his grave before I leave. I didn’t tell Zhanna about Mommy, Mikhail, and folder. I thought to but didn’t. I don’t know why. I tell Zhanna everything. Sometimes I think she knows things before I say them, even sins. Is that what they are? I wonder what you call things that weren’t there but then are. I don’t know what to think. Zhanna and I had tea and biscuits. Zhanna loves biscuits. She is like child when she eats them. I laughed at her, and she smiled. She is younger than Mommy. She stood and kissed me on forehead. Zhanna told me: “Katrina, you take too many pills, drink too much vodka. This is true, you know. It must stop. You must try. Do this Giselle. Be her one last time. You can do this. You must stop destroying yourself. It is not a time to be foolish.” It made me mad. She was right. But I can’t stop. I don’t want to. That is lie. I do want to. But what would be left? Old ballerina. I am forty-two. That is not old. Is it? But my body is eighty. My heart ancient. I dreamed the other night when I first stepped onto stage. A girl. Thin as an arrow. The lights went down. I could see the faces, a sea of faces before me. All watching me fly, like daughter of air.
october 18: Tomorrow. Fly to LA to meet father.
The last line. I sit with the pages on my lap. There must be more, but Zhanna is clever, giving me just enough. How did Katrina say it? Like a good witch in a fairy tale. I collect the pages and lay them on the table. I reach for the phone to call Azadeh. I stop. I don’t call Ortiz either. Or Lily. I pull the chair closer to the window and look down Hill Street to the neons in the diamond district. I want Katrina to myself a little longer. Let her linger, child to woman. Every vic takes you back in time; down roads of damaged things. It’s simple, I know, but that’s what it is, finding the spot that leads you back to where you first met the vic, dead in a bed in a loft, pale and slender, no marks on her. I pick up the last page and read the line. Declarative. Matter-of-fact. No hint of what’s to come, as if she had known Orlov all her life. Father. I put aside the page and imagine her boarding the plane with her diary, pills, and communiqués. It’s 4:00 a.m. My hours are terrible, but I like the stillness, the pages before me. I look down. Esmeralda is camped on her piece of sidewalk in front of the Hotel Clark. I make fresh tea and take the last of the scotch down to her. She’s lost in rags, scarves, and boxes. I hear her breathing—a wheeze, rattle. I sit next to her. She peels back a scarf and looks at me.
“You’re a bothersome man,” she says.
“I have tea.”
“How about ten dollars?”
“And scotch.”
“Pour a little in.”
She takes the mug, warms her hands.
“I seen them monsters in your place over there. They’re gone now. Back to eternity. That’s where monsters live. Eternity. I don’t want to go there.” She drinks, her voice like a murmur in a foxhole. “I don’t let ’em see me. They pass right by. I look out. Don’t look at ’em. That’s the best way with ’em. Let ’em be.”
“You okay?”
“Been cold.”
“You want another blanket?”
“I want ten dollars.”
“Have some more tea.”
“Man, you cheap.”
“My daddy was cheap,” she says. “He’s in eternity. You got a case? You’re always poking around when you got one. Sometimes I remember; sometimes I don’t. Someone’s always dead, though, when you come by. One day you’ll come buy with some good news. Like you won the lottery or something. Then maybe you’ll give me ten dollars. Who’s dead?”
“A ballerina.”
“A what?”
“Ballerina. Dancer, you know.”
“I know what a ballerina is. You think I’m a fool? Speak up. Who did it?”
“Her father.”
“Just like a father to do some terrible shit. God’s the worst of all. Sent his son down to be crucified. What kind of shit is that? All fathers since have followed that path. Fucking up the lives of children. One, two, five, nine, twenty-three, sixty-six. They’re there again. In your building. See ’em?”
“No.”
“Up there near that lighted window. See, he’s moving around the corner now. Ahhh, he’s gone. Four, ninety-nine, thirty-six, two. They go away when I count.” She holds up her mug for more scotch. “You arrest the father?”
“Not yet. Still can’t prove it all the way.”
“But you got a feeling?”
“Yes.”
“That don’t mean shit.”
She hands me the mug, disappears beneath her scarf.
Chapter 29
“What now?” says Lily.
“We go to Orlov,” says Ortiz.
“Might be too soon,” I say.
“No,” says Ortiz. “He’s in the diary. She came to see him. Gotta go see that spy. Rattle his cage.”
“We’re only going to get one chance with him,” I say. “Guy like that doesn’t rattle.”
“Everyone rattles,” says Lily.
“What about the FBI?” I say. “They’re going to want the diary. Azadeh’s been good to me. I don’t want to burn her.”
“Shit,” says Ortiz. “Azadeh might already have it. We don’t know what kind of game this Zhanna is running. We don’t even have the whole diary. We don’t know what’s missing. I tell you one thing though: Zhanna’s the one I’d want on my team. Pretty sneaky broad. Disguises. Pops up all over the place.”
“I don’t think we’re called broads anymore, Captain,” says Lily.
“Sorry, figure of speech,” says Ortiz.
“Like in the old movies.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You feeling better? You look good.”
“I need to get back in.”
“Nice place you got here,” says Ortiz. “I had family who lived in this neighborhood. Long time ago.”
Lily says, “Everybody who came to LA started in Boyle Heights.”
“Back in the day,” says Ortiz. “When everyone went to church and prayed to Our Lady of Sorrows. How many prayers, right? We came here once to visit my dad’s brother. Someone was having a first communion. The sidewalk was full of white dresses. I’ll never forget that long line marching into church. Not like then now. Not anywhere, really.”
“How long have you been a cop, Captain?”
“Thirty plus. My old man, his old man.”
“Same here.”
“It’s like a weed, right? Once it gets in a family. I wanted to be an explorer when I was a kid.”
“Carver told me about your map collection.”
“I’ll show you one day. But by the time I got old enough, everything had been discovered. Maybe some places deep in the rain forest, but then, I figured that with my luck, I’d get down there and be three weeks in the bush, thinking I’m on virgin land, and there’d be some outpost left by Spanish missionaries turned into an Airbnb. Then I’d die of malaria or dysentery. Plus, no money in it.”
“You were born a century late,” I say.
“Victim of time,” he says.
“I like being a cop,” says Lily. “I’m going to make detective, Captain.”
“You got the eye. How fast are you, anyway? This Iron Woman stuff.”
“It’s called Ironman, but women compete. I do a five-ten mile.”
“Damn. You gotta swim, too, right?”
“And bike.”
“Why?”
“It takes you to a place. You can feel all of yourself.”
“You know, Carver likes being a cop,” says Ortiz.
“Won’t show it though.”
“He’s cagey that way,” says Ortiz, smoothing his mustache and smiling.
Lily pours more coffee. A breeze blows across the porch. It’s cold and cloudy, rain to the west. We pass around pages from the diary. Lily wonders what it feels like to be onstage, to dance. She understands the precision, pushing the body, long workouts, sweat. “I get that in my own training,” she says. “The mind making the body obey. But Katrina was making art, you know. There’s a difference. I’ve been watching YouTube videos of her. A body telling a story with no words. It’s beautiful, like she has no bones, you know, like you could bend her into whatever dream you wanted.”
“Must suck to lose that,” says Ortiz. “To hit the downslope.” He holds up a page. “Look what she says here; she’s forty-two, but her body’s eighty. Toll taken.”
“She wasn’t handling it,” I say.
“You know,” says Ortiz, “in the end this could be a suicide or accidental overdose.”
“We don’t have—”
“The body. No shit, Carver. You always got to bring that up.”
“Well . . .”
“Where’d you get these croissants, Lily?” says Ortiz. “They’re good.”
“Guy a few streets over.”
“Good coffee too.”
“Cuban guy around the corner.”
“Mmmmm.”
We drink and eat. Lily turns the radio to late-morning bossa.
“You ever wonder,” says Ortiz, “about what it must be like to be Orlov? I mean, shit, you’ve been on both sides of a dangerous game—decades of it, you know, all the secrets you’re walking around with—and now you just heisted an American election, and look, you just also happen to be a movie producer and a gold miner. A billionaire. You gotta admire the guy on one level. Who has the capacity for that?”
“He’s from another time,” I say.
“Maybe,” says Lily. “He’s a master reinventor.”
“Wonder if he ever knew Katrina was his daughter,” says Ortiz. “I mean, knew way back.”
“Diaries don’t say so,” says Lily. “They say her mother never told him.”
“Yeah, but you ask me, Orlov knows a lot of shit no one ever told him. Where’d you say he is, Carver?”
“Italy. Film shoot. He might be back.”
“I know he’s back,” says Ortiz, smiling. “Got a friend at the FAA. His studio jet landed last night.”
“So you can be useful,” I say. “Waited long enough to tell us.”
“Lily,” says Ortiz, “if you ever do become this asshole’s partner, you have my sympathy.”
“I’m an acquired taste,” I say.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” says Lily.
She and Ortiz laugh. Stan Getz plays “The Girl from Ipanema.” Lily winks. She’s feeling better, the thing of it fading, but it’ll always be there—the scar, the heat of it. I wonder whether Zhanna’s out there watching. Seeing how we’ll play this. She’s got Antonio Garcia too. Or had him. Little Antonio is in deep. Orlov and the Russians have won, short-term. America has turned into what they wanted. What did Lincoln say: “A house divided against itself cannot stand?” Or was that from the Bible? It’s hard to watch TV, contemplate it all, the rushing busyness of it, tweets and clamor, empty air turned into fear and paranoia, and the kind of meanness that stays in the heart. We have slipped beyond caricature. Our spoiled orange king-baby h
as drawn us in. We don’t know truth from lie, or we don’t want to. We’re a rolling, sad circus. Orlov knows. He is one of us. He makes movies we see ourselves in. He has slipped into our tissue. That’s giving him too much credit. We were breaking before. He and Putin just widened the cracks.
“I gotta go,” says Ortiz, looking at me. “Don’t tell Azadeh yet. Let’s talk to Orlov tomorrow and see what we can get on Katrina. Once it goes to Azadeh, we lose him.” He turns to Lily, hugs her. “Glad you’re mending. Thanks for coffee and croissants.”
“Maybe we should get to Orlov now,” I say.
“I talked to his lawyers this morning,” says Ortiz. “I told them we want a meet. Let’s play it this way.”
Lily and I sit on the porch. The radio says the brush fires north are still burning but not as fiercely. Three firemen have died so far, trapped when the wind kicked and the blaze doubled back. Nine hundred homes destroyed. I had forgotten about the fires. They linger in and out of the consciousness, one burning into another, catching the night sky. Mudslides will come with the rains. The earth spoils, and the cycles will get tighter, the radio says, citing a United Nations report that gives us ten years to fix the atmosphere or gradually burn ourselves up.
“Like sun through a magnifying glass,” says Lily.
She straddles me, kisses me. Leads me to bed. We leave the porch doors open and lie looking at the gray sky. It’s not yet noon, and a killer is loose, but this feels like a dark, pleasant, wasted day. I pull Lily closer, and for the first time in a long while, I don’t think or imagine. I let the seconds run through me, accepting their mystery. Lily sits over me. She peels off her Band-Aid. I reach up and feel the stitches, hard and brittle. The scar will be small, I say. Yes, she says. She leans down and kisses me and slides beside me again. Our eyes go back to the sky. The rain in the west has moved our way. We watch it blow and dance on the railing, feel the cool air run over us, and hear children laughing up by the church. It rains hard. Lily gets up and stands naked at the door, feeling drops splash on her, laughing, and returning to bed, wet and cold, pulling the sheet over us and whispering to me to stay the night and be lazy, to leave my gun on the dresser and pretend.
Last Dance Page 19