Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

  “When did Greg leave?”

  “A few days ago, I think. I’m not sure I remember actually.”

  “I’d like that tea, please.”

  “Of course,” she said and went into the kitchen, then returned a few minutes later with a tray. On it were a teapot, cups, a plate with cookies. She set it on a low table, and gestured for me to sit down.

  “You’ve lived here a long time?”

  “Yes,” Mrs Curtis said. “A very long time, one way or another.”

  “Things have changed around here?”

  “Indeed,” she said.

  “Lots of Russians moving in.”

  “I suppose. Yes. Why not?”

  “You have some connection with them?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. I meet the odd Russian in the shops. Some are quite charming. Very well read.”

  “And was Greg Russian?”

  “As I told you, he seemed very nice, though I rarely saw him, he worked in the City, he was quiet.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I really don’t know, Mr Cohen. I imagine he was about thirty.”

  “But his business was legitimate?”

  “What? Of course, Grisha would never do anything wrong.”

  She was angry.

  “Grisha?”

  I had caught her off guard. My gut tightened up with anticipation. I had been right about this. I tried to keep my hands clasped politely. I tried not to fumble for some smokes. I leaned forward to pick up a teacup. My jacket fell open.

  Did she see the gun?

  “He sometimes called himself Grisha,” she said. “I believe it was his Russian nickname.”

  “So he was Russian.”

  “Yes.”

  “You would want to know if something happened to this Grisha, I guess.”

  She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her body almost imperceptibly tensed up.

  “Has something happened to him?” she said.

  “Has it?”

  Her effort to stay calm didn’t work, her hands were in constant motion, clasping each other, unbuttoning and buttoning her sweater, prodding the table as if looking for something lost.

  Putting on my jacket, I went to the window, looked out, saw the rain was letting up, got ready to leave. Behind me I could hear the rustle of paper, as Mrs Curtis knocked newspapers off a table.

  “Please tell me if something has happened to him,” she said. “I have to know.”

  “Why does it matter? If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mrs Curtis who took a cigarette from a box on the table, but didn’t light it.

  “When did he leave?”

  “He left this morning, he came home from a party, he had been out all night, I said, Grisha, darling where are you going?”

  “What time did you see him?”

  “I slept in until eight this morning. He was just leaving. I don’t know when he came in, I don’t know anything, he was away for several days, then I saw him leaving this morning. He was out of his mind. A few days ago he told me that Valentina, a girl he knew, was dead.” Hands shaking, she lit her cigarette. “He said I would see it in the papers. He had to find her killer, he said. I thought he was going to America. He was in a terrible way. He was out of his mind,” she said. “With grief.”

  “You knew Valentina?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And?”

  “She was a beautiful girl.”

  “You knew her father?”

  “He’s the gangster. He’s one of these new Russians who come to London, I heard he put bad wine on the market that made people ill and then sold them his own.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Grisha said it. You didn’t come for the room, did you?”

  “No.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m from New York. I’m a friend of Valentina Sverdloff,” I said. “Your English is very good.”

  “My mother was English. She married my father and stayed in Moscow. She admired the Soviets,” she said with disgust. “She came as a student from London and she met him, and that was it.”

  “What about Grisha?”

  “He was a late child. I was already thirty-three, I wasn’t married, so I slept with someone I met as a tour guide. I thought if I made a child with an Englishman, even if nobody knew- I would have lost my job-he would have English genes. Where are you from originally?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “From your accent when you speak Russian, I would say Moscow. Is that true?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you understand. Many people here don’t understand how we managed things. We managed.”

  “When did you come to London?”

  “Almost twenty years now, I came with Grisha when it became possible, after Gorbachev came into power. I thought I’d be free. When I was a girl, I once told my father I was going to defect. He said he would denounce me to the KGB.” She smoked without inhaling, puffing at the cigarette. “London was my dream city. My mother told me about it, the parks, the red buses. It was her fairy tale when I was a child, and later, she taught me the language, and got me books, and showed me pictures.

  “I wanted it the way other young women wanted to get married. Wanted sex. It was a physical thing,” she said, speaking in her educated Russian. “I saved everything, maps, books, I got a job at Intourist, and when I met English people, I asked them for stamps or even if they tipped me, to tip me in English money. I would sit at my little desk at home, and stack them up, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I come here and it is beautiful. I teach, I send Grisha to school, he goes to America, to Harvard University to take his business degree.”

  “He was a banker in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “What else, he makes money, he has a nice car, he travels.”

  “Where?”

  “Often to Moscow.”

  “Go on.”

  “Two years ago he says to me he wants to go back to Russia, to study there, to work, to be part of his homeland. I said to him, darling, this is your home, but he says, no, I’m Russian. It’s like a nightmare. I had escaped once. His going back was my punishment. It was fine for a while, when he first met Valentina, and they talked about helping people. She was lovely. He became serious. Soon he says he feels patriotic. He loves the soul of his country.”

  “Does he have a sister, or a cousin? Elena? Yelena? Lena?”

  “No, of course not. What sister?”

  I told her about Elena Gagarin. I showed her the picture.

  “I see a bit of a resemblance,” she said. “I don’t know her,” added Mrs Curtis and gave a short mirthless snort. “Gagarin? Yuri? A peasant. Certainly, everybody was in love with him in the old days, but now we know he was a drunk from the provinces. Who is this girl? Did she claim a relationship with my Grisha?”

  “She’s dead. She’s in some photographs of him and Valentina. Somebody beat her up so bad last night, she died. You said Grisha’s hand was bruised.” I gave her a picture of the three of them.

  “It wasn’t him.” Mrs Curtis put out her cigarette. She peered at the picture.

  “Valentina was so beautiful,” she said, beginning to weep.

  “She became my daughter.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “They were both modern children, but they became religious. They wanted to make things normal.”

  My head was swimming in it. How much I hated Russia. How much I hated the religion, the obsession, the sentimentality. Valentina had been sucked in. Sucked in. By a blue-eyed Russian boy who kept a Bible in his room.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They were married last year.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN


  And then Deborah Curtis was out of the door as if she’d heard a shot. As if, like a dog might, she’d heard something inaudible to anybody else. I followed her.

  “I need air,” she said, and put an umbrella up, walking fast. I kept pace with her. The rain had turned to a thin drizzle.

  We got to a shopping street, she turned into a cafe, I followed. She gestured at the empty chair next to hers.

  “Please,” she said in English, and then ordered tea for herself in Russian from a dumpy waitress, who looked harassed, dyed red hair a mess, face weary. I asked for coffee.

  On the table Mrs Curtis placed a picture. In it, Val was wearing a plain white dress with long sleeves, and a little wreath of white flowers on her hair. Grisha, tall, handsome, young, smiling, was in a dark blue suit with a white flower in the lapel, and a red silk tie, and his mother, no glasses, standing straight, looked ten years younger than she did now. Val married. Did Tolya know?

  “The food here is nice,” said Mrs Curtis. “In case you’re hungry,” she added in formal English. “You carry a gun, Mr Cohen? You are a policeman?”

  Around us in the half-full cafe, almost everyone was speaking Russian.

  I drank coffee, she had her tea. Come on, I thought. Tell me what I need to know.

  “Please tell me where Grisha is,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to meet him,” I said. “He was Valentina’s husband. I have something for him from her. She put his name on it. From before she died,” I added, the lies pouring out of my mouth easily.

  “What kind of things?” she said softly but reluctant now.

  “Photographs. Souvenirs.”

  “I can take these things for him,” she said. “I must do a few errands,” she added abruptly, fidgeting, unable to sit still.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call him. He has a cellphone?”

  “A mobile? Yes, of course. He doesn’t always answer.”

  There were things she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. I pushed my phone across the table. She dialed, and looked up. “He doesn’t answer. It says he’s out of range.”

  “I think your Grisha is in trouble. I can help him. He will be an obvious suspect in Valentina’s murder. He was her husband, they’ll look at him first. He’s in Russia?”

  She avoided the question. I waited. Suddenly she said, “They were distant cousins, you were right, Grisha and this Elena Gagarin. She claimed him as a cousin, and she came round once or twice, and I never knew what she wanted. They were always whispering and making plans on some business deal. I heard them mention Mr Sverdloff. Once my Grisha said Mr Sverdloff, Valentina’s father, got in the way of his business. He cared too much, my Grisha, about money, I would say, Grishinka, darling, this man is your father-in-law.”

  “I want to help him,” I said. “Please continue.”

  “Other young people came to the house, and afterwards he would talk garbage to me about his feelings of nationalist pride with Mr Putin in charge. He supported it all and I said, Grishinka, darling, you talk like a fascist. And he told me to stop. We never came to blows, of course, he was always respectful.”

  “And Val?”

  “The more he said these things, the less she came to the house. She went back to America more often and stayed longer.”

  “Did he go to New York after that?”

  “Yes. He went to convince her to come home with him. She wrote to me a few times to say she was sorry not to see me, and I had asked her to take some books to a distant relation of mine.”

  “Olga Dimitriovna?”

  Mrs Curtis looked at me. “Yes. You know her?”

  I nodded. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you were Valentina’s friend, and you will find my Grisha.”

  “Is he missing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t heard from him?”

  “Not for a few days. Except as I told you, for a minute this morning I saw him. He kissed me and left.”

  “Can you tell me anything else?”

  “I think he had a little office up in town where he did his own work. He mentioned this. I asked to see it. He said no. It struck me as odd.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think.”

  “Paddington area, I know because he once took me to the train station and then said he’d walk to his office.”

  “Was he here with you at the beginning of last week? On July 7?” I said, thinking of the night Val had died.

  “No. Yes.” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  “If you want to see him, you might want to tell me the truth,” I said. “Last week, was he here in London?”

  “He wasn’t here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  By the time we got back to the Curtis house, a couple of patrolman and some guys who I made for detectives were on the other side of the street. So was Fiona Colquhoun. I had sent her a text from the cafe.

  “What’s going on?” I said to her.

  “I got your text. I had somebody at my office type in the address you gave me, and a red flag went up.”

  “What red flag?”

  “I’ll explain. Just wait,” said Fiona, turning to take Mrs Curtis’ arm and escort her to a police car, make sure she got inside.

  “What is it?” I asked, and Fiona told me Mrs Curtis’ house was one of the addresses where there had been traces of radiation. You put an address into the computer, at least the computer at Fiona’s office, if it was one of the houses that had been listed, the flag went up.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “This house has been looked at before,” said Fiona.

  “Christ.”

  “You know it was never reported, the amount of polonium that came into London. It left a long trail, hotels, houses, restaurants, and we didn’t have protective suits and escape hoods enough for our own investigators,” she said. “There have been people too ill to report. Bloody Litvinenko,” she added, and I was surprised. “You thought he was heroic? Did you know one of his friends called a photographer when he was dying? But I don’t blame him either. There was no firm ground, poor bastard.”

  I looked at the car where Mrs Curtis sat, the door partially open, a patrolman next to it.

  “What’s she doing there?” I said.

  “She can’t go back in.”

  “What?”

  “There are still traces of radiation in the house. They’ll have to check her as well. Were you inside the house?”

  “Where are they taking her?”

  “They’ll give her a medical check. After that, she says, she can stay with her rich cousin in Eaton Square,” said Fiona.

  Before she could stop me, I broke away. There was something on my mind. I pushed past the cop, I crouched beside the open car door.

  “Mrs Curtis?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you be okay?”

  She nodded. “I’ll be with my cousin.”

  “Will you keep in touch with me?” I gave her my number on a scrap of paper.

  “Yes. Thank you. Will you call me if you find my Grisha? Whatever should happen, I would want to know. Please? Promise this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell me one other thing.”

  “Of course.”

  “What did your Grisha think about Litvinenko’s murder, about his death?”

  “He said he got what he deserved because he was a traitor.”

  “It’s Grisha Curtis,” I said to Fiona, who was sitting beside me on a low stone wall opposite the Curtis house.

  Mrs Curtis had been driven away. It was raining again and Fiona held a large black umbrella over us. “Grisha killed Gagarin and I’m betting he killed Valentina. You can pick him up, if you can find him. I’m betting he’s gone to Moscow. Get your people on it.”

  “I want you checked out, Artie. I’ll take you myself. Come on, get in my car
. Please?”

  There was nothing else I could do in Wimbledon, so I followed Fiona into her car. We sat there, her hand on the key.

  “The radiation leaves traces,” she said. “You were in the house. Did you eat or drink?”

  “Tea.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “I want to read you something,” added Fiona, and pulled a notebook out of her bag.

  For a moment, imagining it was another life, I enjoyed sitting in the car with her, the light rain coming down, the two of us smoking. In another life, I thought again.

  “Litvinenko was as good as the first victim of nuclear terrorism, did you know that?”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you know about polonium-210, Artie? It’s both completely passive and astonishingly active. It can’t move through even the thinnest piece of paper, not even skin. But once it’s been ingested, it moves through one’s body like the proverbial knife through butter. A trace on a table or a teapot and it crackles into life, it moves about, I’ve read it described as devious, sneaky, elusive… I wrote it down,” she looked at her notebook. “I try to remind myself not to be sloppy. Listen to this article from the New York Times: ‘Its sheer energy punched out atoms that could attach to a mote of dust-spreading, settling on surfaces, absorbed in lungs, on lips, invisible.’ The writer calls it ‘a braggart, a substance whose whereabouts were blindingly evident to those who knew where and how to look. It leaped free from any attempt to contain it, spreading, and smearing traces of its presence everywhere I had been, on tabletops, door handles, clothes, light switches, faucets.’ They say it crawls the walls.”

  “What else?”

  “We see those red flags all over London. But are they for real? A trail left by Litvinenko? Caused by rumor? The myth of fingerprints? You understand the power of these legends, these myths?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the Russians have to do is play on the myth. It’s so terrifying, fear itself is radioactive. The Cold War nuts are back in business,” she added. “This is like Pandora out of the box. Irène Joliot-Curie, Mme Curie’s daughter, died of leukemia for her work with polonium. My grandmother who worked with her died of cancer. I suppose it’s become a kind of obsession with me. If the Russians feel it was worth the effort to export this sort of poison, they’ll do anything. And even where it’s nonexistent, just a rumor as provocation, or intel gossip, we spend time chasing it down. Great urban myths, Artie, are hard to beat.” She stopped to catch her breath.