Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  It was five in the morning, and by the time I got to the window, only the faint screams of the sirens were left behind, like a bad, bad hangover.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Is she dead?” I said to the medic at the hospital where they had taken Elena Gagarin.

  “No,” he said. “Bad, though.”

  “You got hold of me how?”

  “In her pocket. Your name and number were in her pocket when the police found her. You’re a relation?”

  I nodded. You got more out of hospitals if they thought you were blood.

  “Come,” he said, and I followed him down the corridor to a room where Gagarin was attached to a tangle of IVs.

  Most of her face was bandaged; one arm that lay outside the thin sheet was black and yellow. She had been beat up pretty good. A cop hovered close by.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I found her,” said the cop.

  “How come?”

  “I was passing. I’d been round to a pub with some friends, and then to somebody’s flat for coffee and I was on my way back to the tube at Notting Hill Gate, and I cut around through an alleyway behind the shops, you wouldn’t know it, over by where the Marks food place is, and I found her. She could barely speak. They beat her up, one used a knife, left her on a building site. Nobody noticed.” He snorted. “Not even in an area where the bloody houses go for ten million quid. You’re related to her. I am sorry,” he said, and I thanked him and went back into the room.

  The doctor told me Gagarin had been in a coma since they admitted her, and we stood by the bed, and watched her for a while, keeping watch, I thought, somebody to bear witness for this pathetic woman. A few hours before she had stood in my doorway, drenched by the rain, asking for help.

  We watched her, the cop, the doctor, technician and me, watched the lines on the machines go flat. She was dead.

  Thinking I was her relative, they gave me her bag to see if I could make an ID. There was a little book, and the address of a building around the corner from Tolya’s where she had told me she lived.

  The bag was made of fancy white and gray snakeskin with a silver buckle which when I looked closely I saw was a fake, a knock-off, a cheap version of the real thing, jammed with make-up, underwear, sweater, a few photographs, a wallet with a couple of pounds in it.

  I put the photographs in my pocket and gave the bag back to the policeman, handed over my cell number, and left Gagarin to the cops and medics, and other people who tended the dead and dying.

  Dead, with no ID, and only a fake bag, Gagarin seemed to have ceased to exist.

  Around eight in the morning, I left the hospital, found a Starbucks-they had spread like a stain all over London-got some coffee, and went over to Gagarin’s place.

  A slim pretty woman, half asleep from the look of it, opened the door. She wore jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and yellow flip-flops.

  “Yes?”

  I apologized for banging on the front door. I said I was looking for Elena Gagarin’s flat, pretending I expected to find her in the house.

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “The police have already been. They said she was attacked not far from here. They’ve seen what there is, and it isn’t much. They told me Elena was taken to hospital very early this morning.”

  I said I was her cousin and I’d come to get some things for her, to take to the hospital.

  “I’ll help if I can,” said the woman. “But she hasn’t lived here for some months. Is she all right?”

  I explained what had happened. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “Is this the right address?”

  “Yes, number twelve, that’s right, but it belongs to us, my husband and me.”

  “You don’t know her?”

  “Look, come in,” she said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee? Tea? I’m Janet Milo, by the way.”

  I went into the hallway. Inside what had once been a private house and was now divided into apartments was a beautiful winding staircase. I followed the woman in yellow flip-flops to the top floor where there were two doors. One was ajar.

  “This is ours,” she said, gesturing at the apartment with the open door where I could hear a radio playing news. She unlocked the other door. “Up top here, there’s a minute little room, I suppose it was once for a servant,” she said. “Elena did rent it from us for a time, oh, six months back, she said she adored the area and she was looking for a place of her own, but she could never quite pay the rent and eventually we asked her to go. We’ve redecorated and there’s a new girl coming to live here.”

  “You haven’t seen her, yesterday, recently?”

  “No, but she did stop by, asked if we had changed the locks,” she said. “The police asked to see the room where she had lived.” She was pretty cool about it, but maybe it was her style. “I assume that’s why you’re here?”

  “Yes, and she’s dead,” I said.

  I realized now that I had never seen Gagarin go into the house. She had lied about the apartment.

  “I’d like to take a look.”

  “I don’t see why not. Coffee?”

  “Do you know where she worked? You must have asked.”

  “I got the impression Elena was always looking for a job. She said she had prospects at one of the big banks, but I think she survived doing translations. Working at a bookshop. Possibly a club that catered to Russians, a bit of, forgive me, sponging off her friends. Quite a few of them have settled around here, sadly. She left early and came home late, and she was quiet. You’re American?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was so nice when we had Americans. I adore Americans. Not too many now,” she said. “The dollar, I suppose. For that matter, there aren’t too many English people, either, not round here, anyway,” she added, a wry expression on her handsome English face. “Do go in. Let me know if you need anything.” I thanked Mrs Milo and she said please call me Janet.

  The little studio at the top of the house was the kind a student might use. It was freshly painted. Striped curtains hung at the windows, which were open and through one I could see Tolya’s house on the other side of the green square.

  A bed, desk, old-fashioned dresser, some lamps, a chair and a little TV completed the furnishings. The bathroom was pristine, and there was no sign anyone had been here.

  Where did she live? Where did she keep her clothes?

  I went and asked Mrs Milo for the coffee, and followed her into her apartment.

  “Elena wasn’t here last night at all?” I said casually.

  “No, and we changed the locks when we redecorated. We’ve got a new tenant coming in this week, as I said.”

  “So you haven’t seen her.”

  “I told the police that she was round several times asking if she could have the room back, that she had some money. But I told her it was already let.”

  “Please try to think, did Elena mention anything, did she maybe leave something?”

  Janet Milo paused, and something seemed to click, and then she said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You’re right of course.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was a while back, and she asked if she could store an old suitcase in our storage room in the basement. I completely forgot.”

  “You showed it to the cops?”

  “I only just remembered. I’ll phone them straight away.”

  “Could you show it to me first?” I smiled reassuringly.

  In the underground storage room, I crouched down and opened the huge battered green suitcase that had belonged to Elena Gagarin.

  Clothes, shoes, underwear were stuffed into the suitcase. There were also envelopes filled with clippings, letters, snapshots. I shuffled through them, including one of Elena herself posed alongside a car that had belonged to Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut. Another of a middle-aged couple, weary-looking people, working-class Russians I figured for her parents. Pictures of Valentina. A picture of Greg.

  I began to sweat. I’d bee
n an idiot not to see it before: Elena and “Greg” were related. You looked at them together in the pictures and you could see it. Brother and sister? Cousins? I had been insane not to see it.

  Rooting around in the suitcase, I found applications for British citizenship, credit card slips, a small notebook with telephone numbers. I tried ringing a few, including the bank where Gagarin claimed to have worked. Nobody had heard of her. There was an ID card. Her name really was Yelena Gagarin, but it was a common enough name.

  This had made it easy for her to imply the connection with the famous cosmonaut, the Soviet hero, Yuri, whose daughter was known as Lena, the diminutive form of Yelena, or Elena of course. This Gagarin had a different middle name, different patronymic, which she had changed to make her game work.

  It was a smart move. Elena knew the current generation of young Russians at home and abroad idolized Yuri Gagarin, that he had become a hero to them as he had to their parents and grandparents: the first big modern hero in Russia, even if he did die flying a plane drunk.

  It didn’t matter. He got to space first, he beat the Americans, he was young and handsome and a true Russian hero. Elena had borrowed a little piece of him, just the reputation, which was easy since she already had the name. It made her very popular. It made it easy for her to make her way, first in Moscow, then in London. In a small notebook, she had scribbled notes about her childhood obsession with Yuri Gagarin, and how she had visited the town of Gagarin where she posed with his car. In Moscow she went to his statue every year. This stainless steel cosmonaut was said to fly annually and grant you your wish.

  From the suitcase diary and notebook and scraps, the postcards and letters in the box-what I could put together-she had arrived in London a couple of years earlier from Moscow, though she had grown up in St Petersburg. She already spoke good English and had worked as a cleaner for a while in a hotel near Heathrow Airport.

  She got to know a few people, guests at the hotel, and then she made her move. She set herself up as a banker. She made friends with Val. Even after she left the apartment in this building on Tolya’s square, she went on pretending she lived here.

  A couple of letters from her mother revealed that Gagarin came from a working-class family still living in one of the crappy housing projects on the fringe of St Petersburg, near the cemeteries, where the mud made your feet sink on a damp day.

  Elena wasn’t related to Yuri Gagarin, she didn’t work in a fancy bank or hedge fund, she didn’t live on Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill, she couldn’t even afford the attic room.

  Who the hell was she? A girl on the make in London? A girl who had come over looking for a life, or a husband? She had managed to fake it with Tolya, Val, even me. Her lying about almost everything was her way of surviving.

  I pocketed an address book I found in the suitcase. Now I was sure Greg had been involved in Elena’s death. And Valentina’s. The three were connected.

  Heart pounding, sweating, in a small wooden box in the suitcase pocket, I found a portrait of Val in a green sweater I recognized.

  But Val was dead. And even Yuri Gagarin couldn’t grant me my wish.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The return address on the envelope I had found in Gagarin’s suitcase was the same as the address I’d found in Val’s bathroom. Wimbledon.

  It was Saturday. I was hungover from the party the night before. Worse, I felt messed up by Elena Gagarin’s death. I didn’t get any sleep, but the adrenalin shot through my body, it made me jumpy, on edge, the tension made me wired. I could smell him. I could smell this Greg.

  If I could stay cool, if I kept the gun in my pocket, if I didn’t lose it the way I had when I saw him at the party on the dance floor, I’d get him.

  It was raining when I got to Wimbledon. Tennis, I thought. They play tennis in Wimbledon. When did they play? I thought. June? July? I took the subway.

  There was a loud, harsh wail of sirens that hit me as soon as I came up the subway stairs. Outside most of the street was blocked off. Rain came down hard. Next to the subway entrance, a small crowd had gathered against a three-storey building. On the ground floor was a fruit and vegetable store.

  “Move them away,” said a uniform standing a few feet away. “Fucking sightseers,” he said to his partner.

  I went over and asked what was going on, he looked at the gold watch on my wrist, a mixture of envy and contempt on his face. He didn’t answer, as if to say, what’s your bloody need to know, mate? He gestured to me to get back against the building.

  It was as if I was on the other side, a civilian. Gun in my pocket, I kept my mouth shut and moved closer into the shadow of the fruit store.

  Among the onlookers was the low rustle of fearful talk. Talk of bombs, guns, murder, knives. Talk of rising crime. Of terrorism. Islamists, they mumbled. Make bombs out of hair dye. They don’t fucking want to live by our rules then they should fuck off home. An old man said this. A woman nodded in agreement.

  Nukes somebody said, radioactive poison. Like the Russian guy.

  Polonium, right? Didn’t they say it jumps out of a box and climbs the walls?

  Anger and fear ran through the little crowd for a few seconds, then fatigue set into their voices.

  What can you do? What’s there to do?

  Most sounded weary but a crude rough English voice suddenly shrieked louder than the others. “They’ll fucking get us!” the man said and the fear turned to hate, and I wanted out. The crowd was beginning to get ugly. I beat it, rain soaking through my clothes.

  The address I was looking for was three blocks away. In the window was a handwritten card announcing a room for rent. I leaned on the bell, a woman appeared, I said I had found some mail, return address in Wimbledon, mistakenly sent to my place.

  Brown skirt, beige blouse, sweater buttoned up the front, the woman at the door looked like one of my teachers at school. She had a weary, pretty face. She was about sixty, her hair was white, fine as tufts of cotton.

  I repeated my story. She looked blank.

  Rolly, the bartender at Pravda22, said Greg had told him there was a room for rent someplace in south London. I took the shot. “I am also a friend of Greg,” I said.

  “He left this morning,” she said.

  I asked again if she had a room to rent. I told her my name, and she nodded and said, “I am Deborah Curtis.”

  I introduced myself.

  Without letting me inside, Mrs Curtis told me she owned the house and lived on the ground floor that connected to a garden out back. Yes, she rented out a few rooms. The house was too big for her.

  I smiled and was charming. All I wanted was to get inside. I had gambled, and this time I was right.

  Sizing me up, she told me that in fact Greg’s room itself was available, and looked sorry that she had said it. “Can you come back later?” she asked.

  “Could I just come in and dry off?” I said, smiling, pointing to my dripping hair.

  She opened the door wider, showed me a bathroom, I toweled off best I could, and then she led me into a small apartment that had been built onto the back of the house. At the same time the doorbell rang.

  Mrs Curtis went away to answer the door, came back to tell me a man had come to clean her carpets. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and she left, looking uneasy.

  The apartment was empty, stripped bare of anything personal, except for a beautiful handmade patchwork quilt on the double bed. The only book on the shelf was a Bible. I began to feel London was a city of empty rooms for rent.

  For a while I sat on the bed, thinking about Val and the gold cross she had started wearing a year earlier. Often, she had touched it as if touching it would bring luck. She told me once that she had started going to church.

  “Don’t look at me as if I’ve turned into some kind of religious freak, Artie, darling,” she said once when we were eating tacos on a warm day in Washington Square Park. “I’m not going to join a convent or something. I’m just
going to celebrate my name day, which will be February 23, for St Valentina the Martyr, and I’d like you to be there with me. Will you?”

  “Do you like the room?” said Mrs Curtis, standing in the door. In her voice I heard the faintest hint of a Russian accent, the way you can make out the presence of a flavor you can’t quite identify in a certain dish. From behind the glasses with clear rims, her eyes darted from me to the room, as if she was worried she had left something that didn’t belong. She walked a few steps into the room.

  In Russian, I said, “What’s the matter?”

  She was rattled, but she answered in English.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she said.

  I reached for the door and closed it so she couldn’t leave.

  “Tell me about Greg,” I said.

  “You said he was your friend.”

  “An acquaintance.”

  “Actually, there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “He was a nice young man, he was here for a year or so.”

  “And his girlfriend?”

  “I didn’t meet his girlfriend,” she said, but her eyelids fluttered too fast. “Did he have a girlfriend? I was never certain, you see, it wasn’t my business after all. I really don’t actually know how I can help you.” Her hand shaking, she opened the door, looked over her shoulder at me as if daring me to stop her.

  I followed her to the living room.

  I could hear a clock ticking.

  “Who else lives here?”

  “I did say. I generally have a few students in the two spare rooms but it’s summer now and there’s nobody. I did mention it, didn’t I?”

  “Well, say again.”

  “No one, as I said. Tea?” She moved into the living room, a small crowded room, stuffed with mementos.

  On the tables were laquered boxes. On shelves that were crammed with books, Russian dolls, the heavily painted matrioshka porcelain statues. No family pictures though. It was as if they had been banished. Plants in the windows kept the light out.