Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  “I’ll take the devil.”

  Kensington Palace, where Lady Diana had lived – somebody dropped this into conversation as soon as I got in the door – was close to the Russian Embassy. Maybe in the next Revolution, the new Russians could set up shop here.

  London had always been a good place to operate out of. My mother used to tell me about it, late at night when Moscow was asleep. She told me how Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had been in London: Lenin and his wife had stayed in a nice place in Kensington; Stalin, who was broke, in a flea pit. She liked spinning stories about the so-called Soviet heroes. It made her feel better. It was her form of sedition, these late-night sessions.

  From the look of the guests streaming into the palace, many courtiers, Tsars, more than one King Louis, a couple of Rasputins, and the others in regular clothes, jewels glittering, they already knew the next Revolution would not take place during Marxism-Leninism class, or folk-dancing.

  “Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a gas gas” went the lyrics you could never get out of your head. This band was almost as good as the original, the beat, the strut, the bluesy heart.

  I had always secretly preferred the Stones to the Beatles, even as a kid in Moscow, when the Beatles were like God, and everyone prayed at their altar; and though I Ioved them for a long time, after a while I couldn’t stand the reverence. And now, at the entrance to Kensington Palace, the noise was like a drug. It picked me up and carried me into the place, where I saw, in what felt like a druggy hallucination, Marie Antoinette, or maybe it was Catherine the Great, wobbling towards me, the heels of her large blue silk pumps going tippy-tap on the marble floor.

  This Marie had very big feet, she was six feet tall plus a yard of powdered wig on her head, thick corkscrew curls hanging down her neck. Shoulders of an Olympic swimmer, big boobs pushed up most of the way so that when she bent over you could see her nipples. Until I saw them, and even then, I thought it was a guy in drag.

  Her blue dress, weighed down with lace and sequins, was so wide that people scuttled away to avoid getting hit as if by a bumper car in an arcade. Unlike the ladies of the eighteenth century, she had a deep hard tan, and a voice that, when she shouted out to friends who passed, could crack Coke bottles. Overhead chandeliers hanging with crystals, and lit up with real candles, made her diamonds glitter hard as the tan.

  I pushed the devil mask up on top of my head. Maybe I should have come as Lenin, I thought, and it was then, near the door, me adjusting my red mask, that the Marie Antoinette or whoever she was held out her hand as if she expected me to kiss it. I gave it a shake.

  “Alexandra Arkadina Romanov,” said Marie through puffy lips thick with implants and gloss. “And you are?”

  The band moved on to “Mother’s Little Helper”.

  I said hi to Marie. She said this was her party, or at least she was on the committee, and that she had been Valentina Sverdloff’s best friend. In mourning for her, she said, we are all in mourning, but one must carry on.

  I’m looking for a guy named Greg, I said to her, but she wasn’t interested. She asked where I was from and I said New York, and she said, no, originally, and I said I was original, and it went on like that for a minute or so, until she spotted better prey, a fat guy in a red frock coat with lace dribbling down his front.

  “Artie.” It was Larry Sverdloff. He was not the kind of guy to put on a costume, and he was wearing tails and white tie and he looked good, the stuff was custom-made. He shook my hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Yeah, sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “How come Tolya got this place for a party?”

  “They rent it out,” he said. “You can rent pretty much any place you want. Can I get you a drink?” He signaled a waiter who swerved in and out between people, carrying aloft trays of champagne and other booze as the crowd grew, and you could feel the heat. There must have been five hundred people. I scanned the room, looking for Greg.

  “You’ve heard from Tolya?”

  “Only a message to deliver when I make the speech. I’m playing host for him. You okay? You have everything you want?”

  “What about Greg?”

  “I put out lines. I’m sure you’ll meet him. Excuse me,” said Larry. “I’m going to make a speech soon, then we can talk. There’s somebody I want you to meet here. ”

  “Yeah, who’s that?” I was getting sick of Larry’s games, if they were games.

  “Somebody else. She’ll be somewhere, probably out on the terrace smoking.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll explain.”

  “Fine, so what’s her name?”

  “Fiona,” he said. “Excuse me.”

  *

  The band was on “Brown Sugar”. I looked around for the musicians, I went through one gilded room after the other, all of them packed, five hundred rich people giving off heat and ambition, and a band playing Stones numbers. I realized the music was coming from outside, from a big white tent out on the lawn.

  Everywhere I went, people swarmed around me, shook my hand and bowed, and asked who I was, but didn’t care.

  I met a guy who had made a fortune installing bulletproof glass, I met art dealers who could get you a Francis Bacon or a Monet, depending on your taste, and people who would protect your art collection because there had already been killings on that front, they said, and I didn’t know if they meant in the financial sense or the other kind that made you literally dead.

  Actors, famous actors I’d seen in the movies, were around, dotted across the room like decorative objects. Brits with braying nasal voices in white tie and tails bragged about their agencies where you could hire butlers with pedigree, realtors who told me Russians liked living in houses near famous people, Belgravia was good, any place near Sean Connery a top choice. Or people with titles, God how the Russkis loved it, they’d say, oh, do meet the Earl of Fuckwit or whatever, and you could see them creaming their pants.

  And there were Russians I recognized from news magazines, the big ones, the ones with the fleets of yachts. These were men who had swiped chunks of the old USSR, oil, gas, airlines, aluminum, the works. Faces as famous now as Lenin and Stalin and the other ghouls.

  I went into a room with painted ceilings, looking for a drink. The bar was massive, twenty feet long, covered in bouquets of white flowers, white roses, white peonies, and along the rest of the surface, gold-colored tubs filled with ice and champagne bottles. Magnums of champagne, Krug, the really good stuff I knew about from Tolya’s club, and ranks of glittering crystal. Tons of caviar was heaped on ice in gold and silver bowls, glistening black and gray and pearly and golden. I thought about Tolya’s caviar deals, and wondered if this was part of it.

  Waiters, dressed in black knee pants and tailcoats and those stupid white wigs, served it up on gold plates, and I was betting they were real.

  As a child, I’d seen a news item on TV about a dinner at Buckingham Palace attended by the Soviet ambassador where all the plates were made of gold. It was intended to show us how decadent the West was, but my mother and her pals turned down the sound of propaganda and peered at the pictures to work out if there really were gold plates in London.

  Drink in hand, mask on my face, I went out to the terrace, scanning the crowd for Greg. I had his picture in my pocket.

  The night was warm and damp. The band was playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” with what seemed to me an epic sense of irony. Somewhere close by I could hear a helicopter. On the walls of the tent, I could see the outlines of people dancing, like a puppet show.

  “Are you Artie Cohen?” a warm low voice said.

  She was tall, slim, brown hair, cut so it fell to her chin, bangs to her eyebrows. She lit a cigarette without any fuss, her hands long, thin, her gestures small and efficient. With her other hand, she pushed the cat mask that covered her eyes and nose onto the top of her head. Her eyes were gray.

  “I’m Fiona Colquhoun,” she said.

&n
bsp; In spite of a serious expression and not much make-up, or maybe because of it, she was pretty sexy. Plain long black dress, three strands of pearls around her long neck. No wedding ring.

  “Le tout Londongrad, eh? I shouldn’t smoke.” She tossed the cigarette into an urn on the terrace and said, “Let’s walk a bit, shall we?” She led me towards a separate building out on the lawns, a huge barn of a place, but beautiful and mostly made of glass.

  “What do they call this?”

  “The Orangery,” she said.

  “You know about this stuff?”

  “I was always a history nut, old houses, my grandmother used to take me. This one was a greenhouse.”

  “Some greenhouse.”

  “Yup, you want to go in? There’s carvings by a guy called Grinling Gibbons, it was so beautiful they probably used it for supper in the summer, and entertaining their pals. Or shall we sit out here?” Gracefully she sat on a marble bench and I sat next to her.

  “I needed some air,” she said. “Russian sentimentality makes me gag.”

  “You knew my name?”

  “I took a flyer on it being you.”

  She didn’t offer any other information, so I played along.

  From a little silver purse she took a fresh pack and lit up again.

  “You smoke a lot.”

  “Indeed.”

  “It will kill you.”

  “Give me a bloody break. My God, look at that,” she added, starting to laugh.

  The guy passing, probably an old Russian thug from the 90s, had been recycled for respectability, and was stuffed into his tails and white tie.

  Like a penguin looking for his mate, he waddled across the terrace. I was drinking too much. I thought I saw Gorbachev. The real one. Not a guy in costume. Fiona followed my glance.

  “You know who all these people are?”

  “Some,” she said.

  Fiona sat quietly beside me, and when I asked, she pointed them out, relaying names, the football players, fashion designers, wives, mistresses belonging to oligarchs, the businessmen and members of various factions and feuds, British politicians in hock to Russian money. Politics inside politics, she said, like Russian wooden dolls, people who had been allies in Russia, were enemies in London.

  “Feuds?”

  “Of course. Some of them are creatures of the Kremlin and owe it like they were vassals, others want to overturn it. You’ve heard of Berezovsky, Abramovich, Deripaska. I think your country just refused Mr Deripaska a visa.”

  The band moved onto “Ruby Tuesday”.

  “You’re wondering how I knew your name?” said Fiona Colquhoun.

  “I guessed.” I looked around for Larry Sverdloff.

  “Right,” she said, as if she understood. “Good. Then we know what we’re about.”

  “These people, at this party, you know them?”

  “It’s my job. You’re looking for somebody?”

  “Could be,” I said. Suddenly the band stopped. People poured out of the tent towards the house.

  “What’s going on?”

  “A speech, I imagine,” said Fiona.

  “You knew Valentina Sverdloff?”

  “I met her once or twice. Let’s go inside.”

  In a long room lined with windows, hung with chandeliers, lit with candles, over it all was an immense screen, widescreen, like a movie theater with images of Valentina projected on it. I didn’t want to look. There wasn’t any choice, it hung there over everything, lit up by thousands of candles and dozens of chandeliers. A thousand people looked up.

  Then the slide show stopped. A picture of Val was frozen on the screen. In a silver gown, diamonds in her ears, face made up, hair done, she barely looked like herself.

  But she knew how to pose. She had earned some money modeling when she was in high school, she had hated it. In that picture, ten feet high, behind the eyes, I could see the self-mockery. The whole crowd was looking at her like she was an icon. And then she spoke. I thought my heart would crack.

  “Hello, everybody,” said Valentina. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you. But I want to say hi and thank you for coming and for giving to my foundation.”

  From the screen she talked about the girls she tried to rescue in Russia, the little ones, the older ones, girls who worked train stations as prostitutes, some as young as ten or eleven. She asked her friends to give what they could, she smiled and smiled, and then she thanked everyone in that husky voice. She thanked her father and her uncle and blew them kisses. For a few minutes she talked, and when she stopped all that remained was her image on the screen.

  She had made the video because even before she was murdered, she knew she wasn’t coming for the party, though Tolya had gone on believing she’d show up. There was something in London that Val hated more, or that scared her more than she had said.

  Next to me stood Fiona Colquhoun, not watching the screen, watching me instead. Around us, people began to weep. One woman with a long face cried uncontrollably.

  There followed more speeches, by Larry Sverdloff, by friends of Valentina, people sobbing, talking English, Russian. A choir in Russian peasant outfits got up and sang some old folk songs and it was corny but haunting, and I felt I had to get away but I couldn’t. And I remembered something.

  One night, when was it? Last year? On a cold fall night we had been walking by the river, me and Val. She was wearing a heavy green sweater and jeans, and she started singing in Russian. She had been learning, she said. She wanted to surprise Tolya. And she sang the old Russian songs, revolutionary anthems, other stuff, and we walked and I had been glad it was dark and she couldn’t see me crying.

  “I think you wanted to meet Greg,” said Fiona whispering into my ear while the speeches finished and people began to leave the room.

  Where?”

  “I saw him go out towards the band,” she said, and took my hand and led me to a white tent where inside the band started up again and people took to the floor.

  Scores of people started to dance, then more, all moving to the music. Russians, Brits.

  Fiona gestured with her head, and I saw him, Greg, a tall guy in a tux and a mask with a girl in a milkmaid outfit, blonde hair to her waist. She wore a cat mask. Greg had Pushkin’s face on his own mask.

  Anybody who grew up in Russia would know it, Pushkin, our national hero, the most admired man in Russia even though he died in 1837. We kids all knew Pushkin, the face, the poems, by heart. Maybe this guy, this Greg, figured himself for a hero.

  I was sure he knew I was watching him. He knew who I was. Maybe Val had told him about me, her dad’s friend, her “Uncle Artie”. And then, for a split second I was distracted by the band which was going crazy on “Satisfaction”.

  On the stage, Mick Jagger did his stuff, strutting, twirling, smirking. I’d figured it for a tribute band, a good one. It wasn’t. It was the Stones. It was the real thing.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. I had lost sight of Greg.

  “The big Russians hire bands privately,” said Fiona. “A perk of my job, Artie. My kid goes to a party, the parents fly in Britney Spears. I’ve seen McCartney, they pay anything, millions, sometimes two, three bands, once I saw the whole bloody Royal Ballet.” She followed my gaze, I was staring at the Pushkin mask. “You want to talk to him. You want me to insist?”

  “What makes you so sure you can force him?”

  “I’m pretty persuasive,” she said.

  I didn’t wait for Fiona, I got myself close to Greg, close enough so he could hear me, close enough he could see me. In the seconds between numbers, as the band stopped playing, I called his name out.

  He turned his face, the Pushkin mask, towards me. The hair was cut short, almost black, the mouth smiling-all I could see of his face was part of his mouth and the blue eyes through the eye holes in the mask.

  For a second he was so close I could feel his breath, this pretend Pushkin, I could feel it, and I leaned into him, my mouth next to his ear.
“You killed her, didn’t you?” I said. “You did it, isn’t that right? You killed Valentina and I’m coming for you,” I said. I was pretty drunk.

  He didn’t say anything at all, just smiled slightly and then moved away and slipped into the crowd.

  On the ground, over the lawns, pathways, skirting the Orangery, the gardens, the huge trees, the torches, I was running, looking for him, swerving between people watching the sky. My lungs hurt from running, my head was full of booze, but I ran, looking for him.

  The Stones had finished. An orchestra was playing the l812, and now fireworks threw up huge gold flowers into the sky, red white and blue waterfalls, Russian flags, Union Jack, more flowers, and in the light of it, I thought I saw him again. He saw me. He raised the mask and showed his face. The handsome face stared at me, the intense blue eyes seemed to be smiling or laughing, and then I realized what the message was-it was a threat. He wasn’t scared of me. He was coming after me.

  He replaced the mask, and again I lost him. He was too good at it; had he been trained? This was a guy who could have slipped in and out of New York and killed her.

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Larry Sverdloff. It was ten, fifteen minutes after I’d seen Greg, and I was still looking, in the parking lot now, among the big cars, among the waiting drivers, and the drunken partygoers.

  “I saw him.”

  “I know,” said Larry Sverdloff, looking pissed off. “He told me.”

  “Fucking told you what?”

  “That you accused him of being involved in Val’s murder.”

  “I said I wanted you to find him for me,” I said. “You didn’t make much effort.”

  “I was going to get you together later, I thought you wanted to talk to him, not accuse him.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s what I think. Unless you know different.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Larry. “I loved her and I loved him, too, for chrissake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He was a good kid, they were the real thing,” said Larry. “My crazy cousin Tolya didn’t approve of him. Val told me she loved him. I thought you wanted his help. Jesus, Artie, what the fuck are you doing?” said Larry. “I’m going to take you to my place, and tomorrow I’m putting you on a plane. Let’s go.”