Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  I told him.

  “My God,” he said, then grabbed his phone, made a call, talked fast, hung up.

  “The guy that was on duty before, he said another cop was nosing around earlier.”

  “Listen, please, man, I’m sorry I came on so heavy.” I said. “Just please tell me whatever you can.” I had almost lost him by sounding aggressive, and now I changed my tone. You get a lot more that way, and now Dravic offered me the chair, and switched on a fan. It was a tight fit, me, him, the little office piled with crates of booze.

  “Masha was here a lot,” he said. “A few weeks ago, she starts pestering me for a job, says she has some fucking bartending certificate, I tell her, it’s not for a kid serving hundreds of crazy people at midnight when they’re already soused and high, you have to scrape teenagers off the floor when they OD on Midori shots and E.”

  “She stopped bugging you?”

  “I told her I’d give her a tryout. I tried her out, a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday night, easy crowd. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like it, I wasn’t sure she was even twenty-one, I wasn’t sure she was eighteen, tell you the truth, she dressed up older and wore a lot of make-up and she had a real grown-up body, but I thought she was a kid, something about her, so I told her, you have to get some real ID if I’m gonna keep you. She was using fake stuff, driver’s license, social security card, but crap, the kind you can buy for sixty bucks. She left. I didn’t hear back.”

  “Any rough stuff in the club?”

  “We get mostly Russians, but the kind with money, they come to party, show off their moves. No fights. Some tension once in a while, especially when there’s a Ukrainian bunch.”

  “Masha got involved?”

  “She could work both crowds, she was very good-looking, and sweet. She was a great dancer. I probably have a video someplace from a dance contest.”

  “Where?”

  “The main office is on the next block over, there’s a house where they keep most of the stuff. I put it there. I might have something else for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She had this little résumé, you know, not much but a couple places she had worked, a few bars, I put it in a file, that any use to you?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Can you stop back Sunday? It’s quiet Sunday. I could go over to the office and get you the stuff.”

  “What’s wrong now?” I said.

  “I have to do this when nobody else is around.”

  “I need it.”

  “Look, please, man, if I try to get anything out of there now, it’ll be a problem, trust me, okay, please?”

  He looked frightened. Dravic glanced at the door of the little office. I figured if I pushed him too hard, he’d balk, or somebody else would get in the way, so I pulled back.

  “Right,” I said. So, you were pretty nice to her, you gave her a tryout as a bartender, even if she was underage-you had something with her?”

  “No,” he said, hesitating just a split second. “She was just a nice girl.”

  “And the husband?”

  “I didn’t get the feeling he would be happy if she was even talking to other guys, it was like he owned her, she had a tat with his name on it.”

  “You saw it?”

  “She told me. It was not, you know, visible exactly.”

  “You’re Russian?”

  “Serbian dad, Russian grandma on his side. My Mom’s a hippie from upstate New York.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “My grandmother taught me some.”

  “Right. So what else?”

  “The Russian girls, they look great, but they can be really chilly, peevish, you know, petulant, like they’d rather be doing some other thing really important, you know, like smoking cigarettes, you know that look? It’s the same everywhere, I met some of them in England when I worked there, just the same fucking thing. Masha was different. She was nice to everyone.”

  “How nice? You think Masha was hooking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She wore expensive clothes?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  His face tightened up. I wondered if he had been in love with Masha.

  I started to go. He put a hand on my sleeve, put it there too hard, clutched the fabric too tight. He was furious, pissed off at me for asking if the girl was a hooker. He kept hold of my arm, and he was solid, muscled, built like a bull.

  “Let go of me, man,” I said. “Fucking let go.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” said Dravic. “There’s guys, I don’t know, Rumanians, Albanians, whatever, they come in with these girls who are really frightened and you can see the bastard owns them.”

  “Serbs?” I wanted to get him riled up, I wanted him to hit me if he had to. It would tell me something about him and the dead girl. He didn’t. He lowered his voice. He understood that I was now a threat to him.

  “What else?” I said.

  “I mean they keep the girls’ passports. The girls are like slaves. Man, if I have kids and they’re girls, I’m sending them someplace else.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Yeah, where?” said Dravic. “Where on earth?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  After I let Tito Dravic go back to work, I called Gloria and told her the dead girl’s name, I told her about the tattoo, and then I started for the street. I’d had enough of the club, the drunks, the heated-up flesh, the bad music. I was going back into the city, but there was something I had to do first.

  As I passed the girls who had greeted Valentina on the street, one of them followed me. Her name was Janna, she said, she had carrot hair and a clinging little blue silk dress that was tight on her ripe burnished body. She was maybe twenty.

  “Can we go out for a smoke?” she said. “Would you mind, Mr Cohen?” She was polite, and we went out to the street and over to the canal where the fishing boats were. Crowds of people sauntered up and down, cars honked, people waved American flags. The fourth of July.

  Janna offered me her pack of cigarettes, and I took one. I figured if we smoked together she’d relax. She was tense, coiled up.

  “You were in because of the girl that died, right?” she said.

  “You knew that?”

  “Oh, in these clubs talk goes around faster than the ecstasy goes down,” she said. “And Tito has a big mouth. He retails gossip as a way to hang out with us.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s okay. He’s just kind of low-class, you know?”

  I showed her the picture.

  “Masha Panchuk,” she said. “We liked her. We tried to help her.”

  “Help how?” I said, and I saw this girl, this Janna, wanted in on the case, that she was curious, nosey maybe. Maybe like Dravic, she wanted to retail the story.

  “We knew she needed a job. She didn’t have any family, only a grandma someplace in, I don’t know, Kiev, or somewhere,” said Janna. “There was a guy, a husband? She wanted out. She was just a good kid.”

  “You Russian?”

  Janna said she had grown up in London, and her parents were both Russian. Her friends in the club had Russian parents, but had been born in Brooklyn. They were at NYU, studying business.

  “I don’t want the others to know about this, they’re American girls, they don’t know how anything works, and I don’t want to scare them. You know, I said to one of them, Don’t you long to travel, and she said, well, yes, but I couldn’t go anywhere I don’t feel safe. They’re frightened.”

  “Listen, you want to help?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to go back in the club?”

  She couldn’t tell what I was after. I could see it in her unformed pretty little face.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Where did Masha buy her clothes, where do girls out here get stuff? Show me.”

  “There’s shops around Brighton Beach. Masha liked a lot of glitz.”

  “Okay, you want to h
elp, show me. My car’s around the corner.”

  She hesitated, and then, rising to the challenge, to what she saw as a dare, she put her smokes in the little purse that dangled from a sparkly chain on her shoulder.

  “Sure,” she said and she followed me to my car and got in, and jabbered while I drove back to Brighton Beach, jabbered half frightened, half excited. I could smell the excitement, especially when I hit the gas hard. She lit up another cigarette.

  “I knew something was wrong,” said Janna. “She tried so hard to get it right, to dress right, she told me she had lived outside London, as if it gave her some kind of qualification, some kind of status is the word I want. Maybe because my accent is sort of English.” Janna looked up at me. “Everybody loved this girl, boys, girls, everybody, I don’t just mean in a friends way, I mean loved as in wanted, but also liked. She slept with a lot of people.”

  “Was she hooking?”

  “Probably. But there was this air about her that drew you in,” said Janna. “She said she was twenty-two, I think she was a lot younger, I mean like seventeen, and I’m pretty sure she was illegal. I saw her in the city at some club. You could talk to my dad.”

  “You said your dad’s Russian?”

  “Yes. Should I call you Detective? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call you.” She pointed at a side street in Brighton Beach and I pulled into it, and she got out and I followed her to a shop. Even at this hour it was open, but it was a holiday and people shopped late.

  “Here,” said Janna. “I know Masha had a dress that she got here.” She pointed at the rack of shiny clothes. The woman who ran the place glared at us. She figured me for Janna’s sugar daddy. Janna pushed the clothes along the rack. When she came to a short dress, pink with some kind of glitter on it, she stopped.

  “It’s what I saw her in the last time. One, maybe two nights ago,” she said. “You want me to put it on?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, but she had already disappeared into a dressing room.

  She reappeared in the dress, plucked a platinum blonde wig off a rack of cheap wigs, the kind you get for Halloween. Imitating girls on a catwalk, in her high-heeled sandals and the wig and the pink dress, Janna strode up and down the room, admiring herself in a mirror.

  “So she looked like this,” she said, as if she had cracked a big case. I realized now she was pretty wasted. I should have seen it earlier.

  “It’s enough,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “I could go with you.”

  “Just get your clothes back on, and I’ll take you to the club,” I said and while she changed again, I saw the owner stare at me some more before she picked up her cellphone, dialed and began talking about me to someone at the other end. She was talking Russian. She probably figured me for a guy who came out to the Beach from the city to pick up little girls.

  CHAPTER TEN

  All the way back to the club, I felt somebody on my tail, somebody watching, following. I didn’t know who the owner of the clothing shop had called, didn’t know if she called local cops, or security people, to say there’s a creep from the city hanging around.

  “Why can’t I stay with you?” said Janna. “It’s fun playing detective.”

  I thanked her and told her to go back to her friends, realizing that I’d created a loose cannon. I didn’t know the girl. I didn’t know what she’d tell her friends, her parents.

  I pulled up near the club, and got out with Janna and walked her back to Dacha where there was a long line at the velvet rope, the guy dressed as a Cossack standing at it.

  “Thanks,” I said, and watched her go into the club, then come out again.

  “Listen,” she said. “There’s this young guy, a cop, he’s here tonight, he comes a lot. He knew Masha, he could maybe help you.”

  Dressed up, black linen shirt, cuffs turned back, white jeans, expensive loafers, hair freshly cut, a gold watch, bright against his tanned arm, Bobo Leven was greeting people everywhere in the club. He shook hands. He thumped them on the back, he gave guys hugs, he kissed girls. Then he saw me.

  I cornered him, made him go into the bar.

  “I thought you were working the case,” I said.

  “I am working it, Artie, it’s okay, I know what I’m doing.” He greeted the bartender who brought him a Coke.

  “So you’re a regular here, you must have known the dead girl.”

  “I saw her a few times.”

  “You already knew her name?”

  “I wasn’t sure if it was Masha, not at first,” he said.

  “You didn’t tell me?”

  “You said you didn’t want to be bothered with this, so I didn’t bother you. You said you were on vacation.”

  “That’s bullshit, Bobo.”

  “You want to hear what I have?”

  “Sure.”

  “Masha had a husband named Zim Panchuk. From Lvov. Ukraine.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “They maybe met in London where they were both working, him as a truck driver, her as a maid. He took her to Alaska. He was legal. He had a job on the pipeline. Soon as they got there, and she was in America, she dumped him and probably came to New York right away.”

  “Yeah, and the husband?”

  “I called. He left his job two days ago. He went back to Russia.”

  “You got a lot of stuff pretty fast.”

  “I called around.”

  “You didn’t think to call me?”

  “I’m sorry, Artie. If you want I’ll keep you in the loop, I just thought you didn’t want in. But from now on, you’ll be my first call, man.”

  “Yeah, well, I have to get back to the city. One more thing, Bobo.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Where were you last night?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A girl I knew slightly was coming out of the building with her dog, a dachshund, and we exchanged views on the noise in the street the night before and cracked some jokes about the tourists. She was going up on the roof one night and shoot at them with a beebee gun, she said, and I laughed. We agreed to get coffee some day and I felt better. Coming home here to my place off Broadway where I’d lived for fifteen years made everything okay. I was home.

  Upstairs in my loft, I switched on the news and got scores from the game last night-the Yankees were so lousy this summer only a faithful dog of a fan like me would care. I was thinking of switching to the Dodgers. At least they had Joe Torre.

  Already there was a report on the girl on the swing. Speculation had begun on Masha Panchuk. It was a holiday weekend and the news cycle was hungry and everybody had an opinion: it was drug-related; the work of some nutjob seeking attention; a crazed terrorist. There was even an item about a Brooklyn artist who made human forms out of duct tape he had purchased after 9/11 when the city bought the stuff in bulk so we could all tape up our windows against some future nuke attack. I turned the TV off.

  With Clifford Brown on my stereo, and listening to the incredible “Joy Spring” solo, I got into the shower, let it pour hot and hard over me, then switched to ice cold. When I got out I looked in the mirror.

  I was looking okay. I’d been sleeping, I had quit smoking for the most part, I lost a few pounds.

  Clean clothes on, I fixed some espresso. My place was looking good. I’d bought it cheap years earlier when nobody wanted a place down here, and I had scraped down the old wood floors myself until they shone. Got some nice mid-50s furniture. Put up shelves.

  On the walls were framed photographs of the musicians I love-Stan Getz, Ella, Duke, Lester Young, Dizzy, Miles. Maybe I’d retire and take lessons. My father had loved the music. Even in Moscow, he had loved it.

  I checked my messages. Tolya had called twice, reminding me I was due at his club to sample new wines. Another friend wanted to know if I’d go fishing the following day. It was okay. Everything was fine. I was okay.

  On that night when I drove over to Tolya’s place, Manhattan felt lik
e a cruise ship, an overcrowded pleasure boat, getting ready to sink, but full of people having a ball as it sailed through the lit-up streets. Any minute, though, it would hit bedrock and start to go down, too loaded up with ambition, real estate, money, talent, sex, drugs booze, work, and always money. It was ready. It was ripe. Something had to explode.

  In the summer, New York lived in the streets. Restaurants and bars spilled their customers out onto the streets, along the big avenues, on the grid of streets running river to river, and in the winding alleys downtown.

  The streets were jammed with tourists gorging on the city, the dollar cheap. Everywhere you heard foreign voices, Japanese, French, Brit, all of them frenzied, rushing the bars, restaurants, even stores that were open late to service them, to sell them stuff, any stuff, sneakers, computers, sheets, like they were expecting disaster, their last best chance, as if they, too, somehow knew a crash was coming. The streets seemed to shudder from so many pounding feet, I felt I could feel them move, judder, throb, under my own feet.

  Every transaction took place over food, booze, coffee, drugs as people hurried, hurry, hurry, to get some whatever it was while the stock market went up four hundred points, then down four hundred points. Oil skyrocketed, money was made out of smoke and mirrors and fraud, and there were more homeless out on the streets than I had seen for years.

  Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.

  A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.

  In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.