Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  Larry got up. “The next revolution, Art. I have to go now. See you at the party tomorrow night.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Watch it, mate,” said a fat man who pushed past me on the street in London.

  Fuck off, mate, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. By the time I got back to London from Larry Sverdloff’s place, it was a dripping day, wet, warm. I looked at the number on the door of a Greek grocery store on Moscow Road. I was looking for the agency where Masha Panchuk had been hired to work at the country hotel.

  People looked pissed off, they snapped if you bumped into the them, in the stores they were surly. London had become a mean place since I’d been here a dozen years ago. Maybe it always was.

  “Bloody London,” I said half aloud. It was what I had felt even then. It was a city that got to me, made me half fall in love with it, then shoved me away, snarling.

  In a row of little stores, electrical appliances, laundromat, coffee place, I found the building and rang the bell. Somebody buzzed me in, and I climbed three flights.

  “Maids, Butlers, Chauffeurs” the printed sign read in English. Under it, on a piece of cardboard, the same sign was written out by hand in Russian. The door was open.

  A middle-aged woman with a kindly face and a hairy wart on her cheek was singing a Russian lullaby to the plants she was watering on the windowsill. Turned when I entered, said her name was Ilana. On the other side of the room was a second door. I figured it led to a bathroom.

  “Please, sit down,” said Ilana, taking the chair behind a desk that held only a calendar and an old desktop computer.

  I repeated what I’d said at the hotel in the countryside that I was looking for somebody to take care of me in London. I didn’t mention Masha Panchuk, not at first, and I didn’t know if the hotel had called Ilana. She pulled her computer screen towards me so we could both see it and then scrolled through pictures.

  I made conversation. On a hunch, I switched to Russian. She smiled. I reflected on the humor in the street where the agency was being called Moscow Road. There was some history here, she added. Aristocrats had lived here; just around the corner in St Petersburg Mews, too. Russian businesses had opened over the years, she said, because it was close to Paddington Station where the train from the airport came in, and close to the Russian Embassy if you needed visas for your workers; and so people clustered around it, and after a while it had become a little joke.

  Where do you go when you get to London? Moscow Road, they would say to each other.

  Flashing my gold watch, I looked at the pictures she showed me on the computer, photographs of the girls who could clean. All good girls, she said. Hard workers. Nice-looking.

  Did she think I wanted something else? I had implied I was a rich Russian and she believed it, the way the woman at the hotel had believed it. I felt I was in disguise.

  More girls were displayed on the screen. Was this a front? Were they offering hookers? I pointed to a girl who looked about fifteen.

  “I like this one. How old is she?”

  “Twenty-one,” said Ilana. “Very nice girl.”

  “She looks younger,” I said.

  I offered Ilana a cigarette and we both lit up, and I let her know what my tastes were. I said, of course, I really did want somebody to clean. It was just I liked attractive people in my house, I liked girls with good manners who could double as waitresses and knew how to greet people at the door, and wear a nice uniform.

  “Of course,” she said, “what else?”

  We looked at more pictures, then I returned to the little girl I had chosen first.

  From my pocket, I took some money out, and slid it under the calendar on the desk. She didn’t look, but she smiled faintly.

  “Can I confide in you?” she said.

  “Of course,” I said, adding we were both Russians and people of the world and we understood each other.

  “This little one, she is young, but we try to help everybody. It’s tough for these girls. Very young, which means very good at taking instructions, like schoolgirl, yes? Very fresh, very hardworking. Shall I send her to you? We want to give our girls a chance for some kind of life.”

  I hesitated.

  “You would like somebody older?”

  “What about younger?”

  “I don’t know,” she said nervously, peeking at the money I’d put on the desk. “I shall ask.” She handed me her card.

  “Expensive?”

  “Yes, but these girls are good,” she said, and then picked up the money I’d given her and returned it. “Thank you,” she said. “But we only accept a fee once you’ve hired the girl.”

  I was surprised. She wasn’t on the take after all, or did she want something else, something bigger?

  Thanking her, I got up. I suggested that she put the girl she had in mind on standby and that I would call as soon as I was settled in my new house.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  I told her it was in the countryside, an old mansion I had recently purchased. Near Bray in the county of Berkshire, I said, and she seemed satisfied. I said again that I would call, she said she would send the girl as soon as I needed her. I started for the door.

  “For a sleep-in maid, yes?” said Ilana, but I was halfway out the door. I waited in the hall.

  I heard Ilana get up, heard the scrape of her chair, heard her move around the office. When I went back in, she was coming out of the door I thought was a bathroom. A scrabbling noise.

  “Is somebody here?” I said.

  “No, certainly not,” said Ilana, looking at me confused, unsure what I wanted, eager to supply it.

  I asked about Masha Panchuk again, and there was too much hesitation before she told me she had never met the girl. She said she had an appointment and looked nervously at her watch.

  From Moscow Road, I walked a few blocks to Queensway, a wide street packed with Russians, Arabs, Chinese. The air was thick with languages. Some guys were trading whatever they had in their pants pockets. Drugs? Nickel bags? Gold watches?

  People like this were always out for crumbs. You could read it in their faces and their clothes. They inhabited the fringes of crime. They hung around waiting for something to happen. They bought and sold drugs or information or little girls or boys, anything they could.

  I listened in. I got the Russian, the exchanges and promises and threats. Some of the Arabic I also got.

  This was a shabby world of people who live off the books. You found them in every big city. One guy turned suddenly. He had a pale face and pallid sweaty skin and a missing front tooth and he stared at me. He knew I had been listening. He offered me girls. Cheap, he said. I told him to fuck off. In a back alley a hundred yards away, I found stalls selling wooden dolls, Soviet army watches, the usual garbage that had begun to appear almost twenty years ago now, the fallout from the old Soviet Empire.

  As soon as I turned myself into a Russian-I talked the language even in my head-I tuned in to people around me. I caught what they said, I asked questions, I got plenty of offers: currency, girls, drugs, whatever I wanted I could get here.

  A place like this, I knew, you could find out who did certain kinds of jobs and how much they cost. This was where I could find out how it worked in London now, maybe the kind of people paid to deal with Tolya, deal with his daughter. Maybe I could get a fix on Greg, the boy in Val’s pictures. Maybe I was jealous, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that she’d had somebody.

  Here too, you could find out who would run errands. If you hung around enough, if you let on you had enough cash, you could probably find out who would kill.

  Maybe this was what Roy Pettus had wanted me for. Maybe without meaning to, I was doing his business.

  I bought the newspapers, British, Russian, I stopped for coffee and read some of them. I began to see that London wasn’t only the banker for Russians, but a marketplace for money, for people, for information, a crazy quilt of greed, ambition, fear. There were l
istings for real estate, for country houses, for apartments in Russia, for furniture and gold and diamonds. In the want-ads were listings for people to service the rich: maids, escorts, butlers, chauffeurs, interpreters, wives. You read between the lines carefully enough, you spotted girls for sale.

  At the other end of the street, near Hyde Park, was an ice-skating rink, and I leaned against the wall and watched for a while. Kids went in and came out, some with skates over their shoulders, others idled in the doorway.

  This was a London of foreigners. Languages I couldn’t even make out ate up the air space around me so that my head hurt.

  So Masha had used a seedy employment agency that might or might not be a front for hookers? What difference did it make? She had been killed in Valentina’s place because of a resemblance, because she had Val’s gold purse. Somebody realized the mistake and went for Val.

  Nothing here, I thought. Not today.

  I gave one guy a few bucks, though. He was a small Russian with a sweaty face and a taste for Middle Eastern sweet things. He talked and fed his mouth with Turkish delight that left powdered sugar on his face.

  I’d found him selling Russian tablecloths at a tiny stall, and he was eager and smart. Of the people I saw on the street, in stores, restaurant, stalls, this one was alert and up for business. He held out the box of candy.

  “Try pistachio,” he said. “Or rose water.” He had a peasant accent, his Russian was crude, but on a hunch, I showed him Greg’s pictures, and told him it was worth quite a bit to me to find him. By the time I left, the little man was already on his phone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “You let them cut her up,” said Tolya over the phone late that night. I was sitting in Tolya’s library, the TV tuned to some Euro sports channel, the sound muted, when he called.

  “They sliced her open, Artemy.”

  “I couldn’t stop that.”

  He didn’t speak, but I could hear him breathing hard.

  “Tolya? You there? I’m coming home,” I said.

  “No. I want you to go to my party tomorrow night, I want you to see who comes, who doesn’t come, who cries real tears for Valentina. Many people will not know you, which is good.”

  “Of course.”

  “But my cousin Larry will know you. He’ll know who you are. You’ll meet him at the party.”

  “I met him.”

  “I see. He sent his guy to follow you around?”

  “Yes. What’s with him?”

  “He thinks he’s going to change the world, Artemy, he thinks he’s going to fix things in Russia, him and a bunch of other guys. He’s okay, but anything you want to tell him, anything he asks, call me first.”

  “Sure.”

  “I left something for you in the closet. In the guest room,” he said, his voice dry and affectless, his language formal, no swearing, no affectionate barbs, nothing at all that reminded me of my friend.

  Valentina’s room was on the top floor, I climbed the stairs and stood outside the door. I didn’t want to go in. The house was silent. There was only the noise of a party out in the garden, but in here it was silent.

  I opened the door gently. The room smelled of Val, it smelled of her perfume, her shampoo. It was an empty space. The bed and the rest of the furniture remained. The drawers and closets were empty, as if she had barely used them, as if she had left this room long ago.

  I hate what London does to him, my dad, ever since he opened his club there. Valentina had said this to me at Dubi’s bookshop. I don’t want to ever go back.

  What did I expect to find?

  I looked through the desk drawers, in the bathroom. Nothing. I got down on the floor and felt I wanted to stay there, wanted to just lie down on the soft rug and sleep for a while.

  Under the bed was a long flat box, probably something that had been forgotten by Val, by Tolya, by the people who cleaned. I pulled it out, sat up and opened it.

  Inside were freshly laundered sheets wrapped in tissue paper that smelled of sandalwood, nothing else as far as I could see at first.

  Again, I searched the room. I tried to look with the eye of a cop, of a guy who had come in fresh, not knowing anything, not the place or the people who had inhabited it. Eventually I found the box on a shelf in the bathroom.

  Inside were a few pieces of jewelry Val had obviously forgotten. There was a thin gold chain with a Victorian locket on it, a pair of small diamond earrings, and an antique bracelet made out of amber. There was also an envelope where somebody-Val, somebody else-had placed some stray beads, a single earring that had no mate, a gold charm resembling a Russian Easter egg. Nothing else.

  I took out the envelope. Val’s name was on the front. On the back was a return address. Wimbledon, it said. Wimbledon, I thought. They play tennis there.

  It didn’t mean anything, but I put the envelope in my pocket.

  What else did Val say about London?

  I sat on the edge of her bed now, and tried to remember. We had talked a little about it the night she stayed with me. I had tried not to think about her. It was all I wanted to think about.

  It was about one in the morning, and we were in my bed and Val leaned on her elbow and said, “I’m starving,” and giggled, though she almost never giggled. Her laugh, the low husky rising chuckle that exploded at the end, belonged to a grown-up. But now she giggled, and said, I’m hungry, and I said I’d make her a sandwich, and we both got out of bed, and she saw me looking at her.

  “Stop staring,” she said.

  “Why stop?”

  “I don’t know, I just feel suddenly shy,” she said, and loped into the kitchen, me in some pajama bottoms I found; her wearing a ratty old bathrobe I had hanging on the bathroom door.

  In the kitchen, I put bread and some cheese and a spicy sopressata on the counter. I got a bottle of red wine out of the cupboard, and poured it out. Val sliced up the sausage and ate a piece, and I made sandwiches.

  “Are you happy, Artie, darling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do we need to talk about anything?”

  “Only if you want to,” I said.

  “I don’t want to, I want you to put on some music and I want to eat and then I want to go back to bed,” she said.

  I put Ella on the stereo. Ella singing Gershwin, and Val put her elbows on the kitchen counter, drank the wine and listened.

  “I love this stuff,” she said. “I love this music. It makes me think of New York, even when I’m here, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to leave, Artie.”

  “New York, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me either.”

  “I can feel good here,” said Val, pouring more wine in her glass while Ella sang “Someone To Watch Over Me”. “That’s you, isn’t it, you’ll watch out for me?”

  “Yes.” I held her hand.

  I didn’t know how the hell I’d tell Tolya but I wasn’t giving her up, not unless she wanted me to give her up. Most of me knew it wouldn’t go on, couldn’t, I was too old, she was Tolya’s kid, but a little part believed.

  “Let’s go back to bed,” she said, and smiled a smile both wicked and sweet. And we did.

  In Val’s room in London now nothing was left of her except her smell.

  In the kitchen I found a bottle of Scotch and did something I almost never did anymore: I drank too much of the stuff, I carried the glass through the house, I drank three, four, five shots, and I kept on drinking.

  In the guest room, I opened the closet. On a wooden hanger was a garment bag and inside a tux. My size. A box on the shelf contained shirts and ties. Beside it were fancy shoes.

  I tried on the clothes, and they fit beautifully. Tolya must have swiped one of my jackets to get the measurements. He had planned it all, he must have planned it before I got to London, long ago, hoping I’d come for his birthday party. Before Val was murdered, he had planned it.

  In the tux and the shoes, with Tolya
’s watch, I looked in the mirror. Looking back was a well-heeled guy, a rich Russian, maybe, with an expensive glass of whisky in his hand, a big gold watch and plenty of dough. Nobody except Larry Sverdloff would make me for a New York cop at the party, for sure not Greg, the boyfriend.

  Was I obsessed because he had been with Val? If he didn’t kill her, why didn’t he show up or get in touch with Tolya? He was Valentina’s guy, what was stopping him? The part of me that was functioning like a cop knew the other part was jealous as hell and it was clouding my judgement and making me stupid.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Even from the entrance to Kensington Gardens, just as I entered the park, in the near distance, I could see the palace all lit up like Christmas, aglitter on the near horizon, and I could hear the Stones. A cover band was playing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.

  As I got closer, the palace turned into a blaze of lights, lights in windows, lights in trees, little gold lights, silk lanterns with lights inside, chandeliers with candles set on tables you could see through the tall windows, real torches lining the drive. Tolya’s party, Valentina’s party, a party in honour of Val’s charity, a party where they both should have been. In my hand was the invitation I had taken from Tolya’s mantelpiece.

  The band shifted to ‘Wild Horses’. Security was everywhere, guys in uniform, others in plain clothes, Russian muscle speaking into the collar of their evening clothes that were too tight, others in costume.

  Near the entrance where people were streaming in, was a bunch of gorgeous girls in period ball-gowns, diamonds on every part, wrists, ears, necks, greeted me. Slavic cheekbones, legs up to their armpits, the Russian babes were working the door.

  All suited up in the tux and new shoes, I passed in without much trouble.

  “Devil?”

  “What?”

  “A mask?” One of the babes was holding up a red devil mask with sequins on it.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Cat?”

  “What?”

  “I think there’s others,” she said worriedly, sorting through the basket.