Chapter 30
The gate swings open. I drive through and park by a fountain. A peasant girl with a vase—the kind of centuries-old, perfectly scaled statue that one sees in small towns in Europe, calling no attention to itself amid the honeysuckle and jasmine. The villa is pale yellow with green shutters and a Mediterranean tile roof. Vines run along the corners, and two small angels peek down from above the front door, inviting yet watchful. The sounds of the city have fallen away. I feel as if I have wandered into the Italian countryside. One senses that from time to time in LA, those moments when air and earth awaken the ancient. It is the feeling J. P. Getty had when he built his villa beyond the Palisades. But this is different. The home’s beauty is in its simplicity, the way it rises in rustic grace.
Armando Torres appears, dressed in chauffeur black, wearing wraparounds and betraying nothing, not even the disgust I know he burns with after Ortiz bypassed him and arranged the meeting through Orlov’s lawyers. He nods and leads me to the front door, across the mosaic foyer, through the living room with billowing linen curtains, and out back to a pool and gardens. A man is swimming. On the other side of the pool, a woman in a blue one-piece lies on a chaise longue in the sun, a few books and a pitcher beside her. Torres points to the table and retreats. I sit beneath an umbrella. A man in a white blazer pours coffee and lemonade, glancing at me, then away. He disappears. I watch the swimmer doing laps. He glides at a fast pace with no splash. The lawn stretches to an ivy-covered wall at the west end of the property. I wonder how difficult or easy it is, depending on one’s wealth, to build a world inside another. It takes a certain architecture, I suppose, a discipline. The woman on the chaise longue stands; she looks like Juliette Binoche. I think she is. I remember The English Patient, and her shadow dancing on the wall of an abandoned villa very much like this one, and how she read to a dying man and cut off her hair but was still beautiful in the way only a few can be. She looks at me, says nothing, and walks into the house. I am alone. I listen to the man in the water. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. I take out my notebook. I smile. I could write here in the mornings, drink coffee, think of plots, turn them into movies, and swim in the afternoons with Juliette Binoche.
Mickey Orlov rises from the pool. He walks up the steps in the shallow end. He’s in his seventies and taller than I expected, thick in the shoulders, with long-muscled arms. He wraps himself in a white robe and turns toward me, water dripping off his silver hair, his face stony and tan. I can’t tell whether he’s had work. Everyone in this town has, I suppose, but like his home, he has an unadorned elegance about him. This is a man who could slip into places and convince you that he belongs. I stand and shake his hand.
“Was that . . .”
“Yes,” he says, “Juliette’s in town. We’re making a little film and we want her to stay a bit longer, but she has to be on another shoot somewhere else. It’s all timing, you know. Never the project, but the timing.”
He pours us lemonade.
“I suppose it seems strange,” he says.
“What?”
“To have Juliette Binoche in one’s backyard.”
“It’s your world.”
“It is. But it still amazes, Detective. I’ve never taken it for granted. I hope I haven’t, anyway. When I came here a long time ago, before my first film, I met Kirk Douglas at a party in Malibu.” He runs a hand through his hair and laughs. “The classic name-dropping story, but I was younger then. Not immune. Kirk was standing alone on the beach. It was dusk. He was drinking a martini. His profile—you know that famously etched face—was cast against the sky. For me it epitomized Los Angeles. How beauty can overwhelm. I found it ironic too. The first movie I had seen Kirk in was The Bad and the Beautiful. He played a movie producer, and that’s what I was going to be. He’s still alive, you know, Kirk.” Orlov drinks his lemonade. The man in the white blazer appears, pours coffees, vanishes. “I love film, Detective. I always have. My studio is named for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris. Do you know it?”
“Science fiction.”
“A psychological mystery in a space station. Tarkovsky had big ideas. He wanted to explore emotional crises in the blackness of the cosmos, where things, both inside and outside us, can float away.”
“Pulled by other forces.”
“Exactly, Detective. Exactly.”
He nods toward the villa. Torres is standing in the window, arms crossed, wraparounds snug.
“I’m afraid you’ve made an enemy, Detective,” says Orlov, smiling. “Armando likes to be my gate. You and your boss went around him.”
“I don’t see your lawyers.”
“We don’t need lawyers, do we?”
“I tend to do better without them.”
“I like your sense of humor, Detective. I miss the wonderful noir that came out of Hollywood. Chandler. Hammett. Bogart. Those kinds of movies aren’t as clever today. I’ve made a few. One was good. Quite good, actually, but still, there was something. A missed slyness. That’s why they worked, you know. They were sly and fast, and the dialogue snapped. It was smart. They don’t write smart so much today, or it’s so smart it’s unintelligible.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Katrina Ivanovna.”
“My daughter.”
He sits back, lets the words settle.
“You look startled, Detective. That’s why you’re here, correct?”
“Yes, we’ve learned—”
“I only just learned too. A few months ago.” He smooths his robe, crosses his legs. “I had never met her before. I had known her, of course, as a ballerina. One of the best. In her day.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his robe pocket, offers me one. I accept. He strikes a match. I lean toward it. “She appeared unannounced at Solaris. My secretary came into my office and said, ‘There’s a Katrina Ivanovna at the gate. Do you know her? She has no appointment.’ Just like that. I had no idea why. I was intrigued. She came up. She was a mess. Too thin, not made up. The eyes of pills. I know those eyes very well. This business is full of those eyes. She sat and stared right at me. ‘You are my father.’ I’ll never forget that look or those words. Tell me, Detective, what does one make of that? ‘You are my father.’ Out of thin air.” He blows smoke. “She told me about Maria, her mother. She and I were lovers once, back when we and the world were very different. Maria had told Katrina. I never knew.”
“You were a spy traveling the world.”
His eyes narrow; his jaw tightens. Just a bit.
“I was a government worker stationed at various embassies,” he says. “Maria became a linguistics professor. Our jobs took us apart.”
“Maria is something much different today.”
“I don’t know. I’ve lost touch with all that. I loved her, Detective, long ago. You’re too young to know about the Cold War. Decisions made. Lives given up. You sacrificed back then. On both sides of the Atlantic.”
“You sound nostalgic.”
“I don’t deny it. But lives go on.”
“I thought spies—government workers, that is—were good at knowing things. You really didn’t know you had a daughter?”
“I did not.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“As I’ve said, and as you know, I haven’t lived in Russia in many years. Accents aren’t like fingerprints, Detective. They can disappear. Maria taught me that when I was young.”
“You had no idea she was pregnant?”
“You keep pressing this point. I had no knowledge of a child.” He quiets and looks to the pool and back. “A young woman appears out of nowhere and says she’s your daughter. I remember her face when she said it. Hope, anger, the sadness of somebody lost. I didn’t know what to feel. I stepped closer to her. We looked at each other in silence for a long time. It was as if we were animals trying to detect a scent. Isn’t that strange? I told her what a beautiful dan
cer she was. I think I said she was a genius. She was, you know. I saw her dance twice in Europe. Nobody moved like Katrina. You felt it. Everyone in the audience did. She was our ideal. That yearning in us when, for a moment, the human becomes divine. Have you ever had that feeling? I’m sure you have. I had no sense she was my daughter. I knew only that she was magic on the stage.” He crushes out his cigarette and lights another. “We’ll never know, will we, Detective,” he says, staring at me as hard as anyone ever has, “if she was my daughter?”
“It’s in her diaries.”
“I supposed you had read them. Why else would you be here? I have never seen them myself. Katrina told me she kept them.” He leans closer. “I suspect, Detective, that you have not seen all the diaries. What is that word? Oh, yes, I would bet you have read only the abridged version.”
“Why do you say that?”
“A feeling.” He leans back. “May I ask you something, Detective?”
“Please.”
“Do you think she suffered? I suppose everyone asks you that. But I hope she didn’t suffer.”
“She looked as if she was sleeping. We don’t know how she died.”
“Yes, I read. Quite an embarrassment for you to lose her.”
“There’s no way to change that.”
“No autopsy.”
“I can’t say.”
“No use holding a hand you don’t have, Detective.”
“Let’s leave it at that, then.”
“She was quite troubled,” says Orlov. “Too many pills, too much drinking. I could see it in her that first day we met and the days after.”
“How many times did you see her?”
“Three or four. She was back in LA for Giselle. She had such hopes for it. I think it was the penance she wanted. She thought if she could dance beautifully one more time, she could be redeemed. I understood that. Who doesn’t want absolution? We talked about it. She was so sarcastic. She could be quite cruel to herself. She said Maria did that. The second time I saw her, we had lunch right here. She reached across this table and held my hand. She didn’t let go. Like a child.”
“Imagine.”
“I do. The last time I saw her was two days before she died. It was here. I wanted to believe she was my daughter. I wanted certainty. Not diaries and stories from Russia. I asked if she would take a DNA test. I told her we could go together.” He takes a breath. “It changed then, Detective. It was a threat to her pretend world or the world she believed to be true. Perhaps I wanted to believe too. She burst into such rage. She looked at me with hate, as if I had betrayed her. The change in her was instantaneous. She started yelling. She said she knew things. She said she could destroy me. I tried to calm her. I held her, but she pushed away and ran out the door.”
He pours lemonade, looks across the pool, down the lawn to the ivy wall. “That’s the last time I saw her. It was a rejection. That’s what she thought. She thought I was rejecting her because I wanted proof. The drugs didn’t help. She was delusional. Paranoid, I’d say. But mine was a simple request.”
“Most people would want proof.”
“She didn’t see it that way. So volatile even in the short time I knew her. Too many addictions, Detective. She didn’t want to hurt, and she was running out of ways not to. What I asked hurt her.” He looks to me. “I don’t know if she was my daughter. I suppose I won’t.”
“We can do a DNA test.”
“Her body’s gone.”
“We have evidence we collected from her loft. We could pull a sample from it.”
Orlov’s eyes quicken. He looks at me, away and back, crosses his legs. He must have anticipated my suggestion. He was a spy or, as he put it, “a government worker.” From what I read about him, he was always ahead of everyone. Why does he seem agitated now? Not much, just a glimmer. He tucks it away.
“I suppose we could arrange that.”
“When?”
“I’ll have to check my schedule, Detective. I fly to France in a few days. Perhaps when I return. We can arrange it with my lawyers.”
“Do you want to know?”
“I did. I’m not so sure now, to be honest.”
“What do you suppose she meant by ‘destroy you’?”
“I have no idea. But you must know a lot about me. You’ve read.”
“Many lives for a government employee.”
“Maybe someone from one of them wants to do harm.”
“I read you were the cleverest of all.”
“No clever man would believe that about himself.”
“Do you know a man named Jimmy Krause?”
“No. Armando told me you asked about him. I think he told you this Mr. Krause served with him in Iraq. I never met him.”
“Krause drove around two Russians. He took them to Katrina’s in the days before she died.”
“As I said, Detective, I don’t know a Mr. Krause.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes. Armando told me.”
“Do you know the two Russians?”
He laughs. He wants me gone.
“I know many Russians, Detective. But the two you’re referring to, I have no idea.”
He looks to the house. The door opens. Armando Torres is on his way down the path.
“I have an appointment, Detective.”
“Juliette?”
“She’s probably gone by now. Out to lunch somewhere.”
He stands. Shakes my hand.
“Armando, please show the detective out.”
Torres steps beside me, nods toward the path.
“We should get the DNA test done quickly,” I say.
“I’ll arrange it,” says Orlov.
“I hope we meet again.”
“Perhaps.”
Chapter 31
The gate opens. Armando Torres stands watching and then walks to the villa and disappears in the rearview. I drive toward West Hollywood. My phone rings. Azadeh.
“Meet me.” Click.
I cut down to Wilshire and head toward the barbecue place Azadeh likes off South Serrano in Koreatown. It’s where we meet when things can’t wait. I pull into the parking lot and see that her car is already there. The lunch crowd is thinning. Azadeh sits in a back booth near the kitchen, talking to the owner, a fat man in a stained white apron drinking a beer. His seng bulgogi and tteokbokki have become legend since both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times reviewed him in the space of a month. That was years ago, but a chef can ride on that cred for a long while. He winks at me and hurries through swinging doors into the heat of the kitchen.
“Shit, Carver.”
“I know.”
“We’ve been watching Orlov. You didn’t think we’d see you pull up to the villa. What the f—”
“I—”
“Don’t say anything. You screwed me. I need to be mad. Sit there.”
“You ordering?”
“Don’t speak.”
Two phones buzz and glow before her. She doesn’t reach for them. I take out my notebook and write “perhaps.” The last word Orlov said to me. Open-ended with the scent of possibility, it’s also a word that connotes obscure inexactness. I wonder what Maria, Orlov’s long-ago lover, the linguist, would have made of perhaps. That was, in the end, when he went his way and she hers—all she got: two syllables with no clear intention. I write “diary” and “daughter” and “Where is she?” Azadeh twirls her long dark hair into a bun. She looks tired, no makeup, rattled. I imagine her hours earlier, leaving her South Pasadena craftsman at dawn, stopping at the coffee shop on the corner in those last moments before the noises—landscapers, yoga women, and school buses—steal away the quiet and send her, cup in hand, to her Prius and toward crimes waiting in the cool of a new day. The coffee shop is her ritual, one she keeps even from El
sa. But I know it. I’ve seen her over the years when I’ve been sleepless and out driving.
Azadeh looks at me.
“I thought we had an understanding,” she says. “I told you Orlov was off limits, that we were looking at him for the election thing. It’s much bigger than you, Carver. You know that, don’t you?”
“I never mentioned anything about the election to him. Nothing about spying. I only talked about Katrina.”
“You don’t have anything. Not solid.”
“We’ve got Jimmy Krause, a friend of Orlov’s chief of security, shot by a pro. We’ve got Krause driving two Russians to Katrina’s loft before she dies. The Russians vanish. When we talked to Krause, he was starting to break.”
“And who the hell gave you Krause? Remember? My CI—that’s how you got him. Then you get Krause killed.”
“We’ve got a drug-addicted ballerina who wants to write a memoir that could implicate Orlov in something. I don’t know what, but it certainly gives him motive.”
“Not enough to bring him in, and you know it. What else have you got?”
“What else do I need?”
“Don’t be coy, Carver. You’re no good at it.”
“I’ve got nothing else.”
“Why did you meet with him, then? You must have more than you’re telling me.”
“What do you have?”
“I’m not playing this game, Carver. You’re pissing people off and you’re jeopardizing a national-security investigation.”
“What about a woman’s death?”
“Tragic. Is that what you want me to say? Gifted ballerina dies. The world weeps. But the world doesn’t weep. She wasn’t gifted anymore. She was a has-been.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I believe you’re getting in the way of something more important than a dancer’s death.”
Azadeh doesn’t have the diaries. If she did, the FBI would have moved on Orlov. What is Zhanna’s play? I don’t know enough about her except that she was Katrina’s confidant and refuge from Maria. Zhanna’s an operative. But for whom? Katrina called her a sphinx. Are the diaries real? Or the work of some would-be novelist typing away down a Russian intelligence hallway? I haven’t seen the originals, only translations by someone not fluent in English syntax and grammar. Orlov said I have the abridged version. He was smug about it, but how would he know? He’s a spook, so he would know, but I don’t think so. He allowed me to see him—sent away his lawyers and made Armando Torres wait inside the villa—to gauge what I knew. The diary pages I have aren’t in chronological order, and much is missing, but for my case, they’re another piece of evidence leading to Orlov. Or am I being duped?
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