“I said, is she Russian? He said yes, and I asked her name because I sell to so many Russians.”
“What did he say?”
“It was for Olga Dimitriovna.”
When Dubi described him, I knew for sure it was Grisha Curtis.
“I said, I just sent novels to Olga, and he asked which ones and who bought them, and he was very nice and made like he knew Olga and her friends, so I told him. I said Tolya Sverdloff ordered them, or perhaps it was his daughter, and that a friend had delivered them, and he said, oh, Mr Sverdloff must be a nice man, and I said yes, and he asked for different books so he would not give to Olga the same books. He used his credit card.”
Grisha had used his own card. Like I thought, he was a novice, a zealot with an obsession, not a pro. But somebody else had been involved, somebody who did his dirty work on Masha, I was guessing, but I didn’t think it was Grisha, not that first killing. It was the work of a professional thug.
“Artie?”
“Yes?”
“He came back.”
“What?”
“He came back. He bought history books,” said Dubi, “the kind Olga never read, including Solzynitsin’s most recent essays, the attacks on the West, the Russian nationlist crap. Nobody reads this shit,” added Dubi succinctly.
“What dates?”
“He came back on July 7, end of the day, he buys this stuff and also some photographic materials, brushes to clean old-fashioned lenses, this sort of thing, I don’t ask why.”
“You’re sure of the date?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“I had one or two photographs by Valentina Sverdloff on the wall and he couldn’t stop staring at them.”
I tried not to fall asleep, I drank a warm beer, I called Bobo Leven and when I finally got through I told him about the books, and that through all Curtis’ notes written in English- which many were-there were references to somebody called T, and amounts of money next to the name. At first I thought it was for Tolya. I went and put my whole head under the cold-water tap. T. Who was T?
Dripping, cold as ice, shaking from fatigue, I went back into the room and called Sonny Lippert.
“Come home,” said Sonny Lippert. “You heard from Sverdloff?”
“He calls. He doesn’t say much.”
“You got anything over there, Art? On the Sverdloff girl?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Listen to me, Artie, forget this, just come home. Your friend Tolya is running his own private investigation into his daughter’s death, man. He’s got that kid, Leven, moonlighting for him. He’s everywhere, he’s on TV, in the papers, yelling and screaming about the Russkis, man, about how they got state terrorism all over again.”
“Go on.”
“Shit is what is hitting the fan,” said Sonny. “Shit is what he’s going to be up to his waist in. He’s making a lot of noise, he talks crazy stuff about radiation poisoning, about people at the top stealing money, he doesn’t give a flying fuck who he talks to, man. The TV talk shows are eating it up between election news. He makes a great show, man, but he’s crazy, the thing with his kid, talks about how she’s a martyr, he’s nuts and I don’t blame him, and I know he’s your friend, but you have to stop him.”
Somebody had used the word saint for Val. Mrs Curtis, her mother-in-law had said it: she was a saint, she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t just a turn of phrase for her, maybe it meant more. Who would have posed her like that, like a saint, or a martyr?
“Sonny?”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure, man.”
“Call me back in an hour, okay? Call me. If you don’t get an answer, call this number,” I said, and gave him Fiona’s cellphone.
“You’re not coming.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“I’ll call you,” said Lippert. “You think somebody is enjoying our conversation? You think that funny little click is our other conversationalist?”
“I don’t know, Sonny. I don’t know how to do this. I’m a New York homicide cop. There’s nothing here I understand.”
“Maybe you should have listened to your father, he could have taught you the spy thing, right? Yeah, sorry about that, man, forget the fucking joke.”
I hung up.
I went to the window. It was getting light. Nobody outside. I waited. Nobody in the hall. I put my clothes back on, and waited, and went back to the paper trail.
Most of what Curtis fed his control, if that was what you called it, was titbits of information, gossip about the London scene. Only when Val began making a fuss about officials, when she began talking to Russian journalists, did the exchanges between Curtis and the guy in Russia heat up.
My face burned with fatigue. Legs buckled. No sleep. I washed my face. Fiona Colquhoun would be looking for me at Tolya’s by now. I had to get back. I put on my jacket, and stuffed the papers as best I could inside the pockets.
Had I been wrong to talk to Fiona?
Was I wrong to trust anybody? Even Larry? Or Tolya? Were they all Russian spies at heart, secrets buried so deep you could never separate the truth from the paranoia that made you distrust them and made them unreliable?
I went downstairs. The clerk was asleep behind the desk. I now knew that Tolya Sverdloff had not been the target. Valentina was not killed as a warning to him. She felt herself to be an American girl with the right to say whatever she wanted, to do whatever she wanted. And she was murdered for that, for what she said.
Footsteps rang out louder and louder on the hard sidewalk behind me. If I showed my gun in London, I’d be in trouble. I wanted to get the stuff I had on Grisha home, or at least to Fiona. She was my best gamble here.
But Grisha was behind me, like he had been, barely visible, almost never showing his face; and in the early morning rain, sidewalk slick as marble, I ran like a crazy person.
The footsteps came after me, and so fast I couldn’t think, a pair of arms like tree trunks locked around my shoulders and somebody dragged me up a short stretch of street and into a narrow mews, an alley, behind a row of cars.
It wasn’t Curtis. I got a glimpse of the face, it was only muscle, a thug. But Curtis had sent him, Curtis, who knew I had been in the building, and the hotel, who knew what I was doing. He had the means. He knew the right people. He would know who to call to summon the creep who was ripping at my eyelid with his fingernails.
There was a wound over my eye, and old wound that had healed badly, and it was as if he knew, as if he had studied a picture of me to see where I was vulnerable. He pulled at the skin. I was on the ground, wet, almost too tired to move. Again he peeled the skin from the wound, digging his nail in. The pain was unbearable.
In Russian, I swore at him, his mother, the country, everything I could think of, and he pulled back, looking for his gun, maybe. In that second, I managed to reach for my weapon, grabbed it, swung at him and hit hard with the butt. Again. I hit him until he let go and fell back on the sidewalk. Next to him was a pair of wire-rim glasses, the lenses shattered.
I didn’t wait to see if he was alive or not.
By the time I got back to Tolya’s, it was light. Upstairs I looked at my eye. The raw skin was bleeding and I patched it up with Band-Aids.
I took a hot shower. I got out and wrapped myself in a towel, and poured myself a drink, and knocked it all back, and then it came to me. I got it.
My God, I thought. The m on Masha, the letter carved in her flesh, wasn’t an m. It was a Russian t, the version of the lower case t. I got out of the shower and called Sonny Lippert.
“It wasn’t an m.”
“What?”
“The creep who carved an initial on Masha, the girl in the playground, it wasn’t an ‘m’ for ‘Masha’ like we thought: it was a Russian ‘t’. There was a T in Grisha’s notebook, ask around, Sonny, okay? Look for a guy with a T.”
“Jesus,” he said.
/>
“Do it.”
He had already hung up.
“You were onto something, man,” said Sonny when he called back. “Earlier you said T, you said the letter T was in the notebook, look for a guy with a T? Turns out your Bobo Leven been looking very hard at a thug named Terry. Terenti is his Russian name. I got onto Leven to tell him what you said. Terenti looks very good for the girl in the playground, for Masha. They picked him up already. I’m betting he killed her. We’re checking evidence. You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Doesn’t matter. Leven’s doing his job?”
“I don’t like him, Artie, man, he’s a hustler for sure, he has a foul mouth and he’s a fucking racist little shit, but he’s smart, and he worked this case like a crazy person.”
“What else?”
“Terenti’s other jobs have all the same earmarks,” said Sonny. “The duct tape. The setting up the bodies like statues, like the girl, Masha, on the swing. He moves easy between New York, London, Moscow, Mexico, Havana, wherever he wants. He travels legal, we found entry dates into New York that would match up.”
“He wear glasses?”
“Jesus, man, how did you know? Yeah, he looks like a guy who reads books, little wire-rim glasses, maybe he thinks he’s Trotsky, or some other revolutionary fool.”
“Yeah, well, reading books doesn’t make you nice,” I said. “What kind of books?”
“I’ll ignore that,” said Sonny. “We think he killed Masha, but Valentina Sverdloff, it doesn’t look like the same guy. We’re checking everything, all the forensics, top priority.”
“Just call when you make the case,” I said.
“We won’t let this one go, Art,” he said. “You know what I hate about this global thing, Artie, man, I used to run my investigations in New York for New York, and now everybody is running around the planet, and nobody knows who works for anybody. It’s porous like it’s never been and we whore ourselves to anyone with a buck, so the intel is just out there, all of it,” he said. “The more we do business with asshole countries like Russia and China, the more loopholes there are. Also, the creeps that got the money can just disappear. Plus you got a jackass running Homeland Security who forgets to put air marshals on planes. We’re in a whole new place, man, we’re in a lateral thing, which means no place.”
“Listen, you said this Terenti reads books, you mean literally?” It popped into my head like a jack out of a box.
“Yeah, man. They picked him up, he had a pile of them in the motel room.”
“In Brighton Beach? The motel?”
“Yeah.”
“The books were in Russian?”
“I heard yes.”
“Who’s keeping you in the loop on all this?” I said.
“Listen, you know Dubi Petrovsky?”
“Yeah, the guy where you got me that first edition Conrad, right? Big guy, shop out near the beach?”
“Right. Find out if he sold the books they found with this Terenti creep, okay?”
“Sure, man. You think this could turn on books?”
“With Russians, yeah, sure, they love to think of themselves as intellectuals, right?”
“One more thing.”
“Yeah, Sonny?”
“Terenti, turns out he’s done it before, he signed his work on another girl. The letter m in Masha’s flesh, his signature, like he was the author of the job.”
“My God.”
“Come home soon as you can, man.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Please come,” he said. “My car is waiting,” he added, calling me MooDllo, the name no one except Tolya ever uses. “Asshole, I need you to meet me.”
“Where?”
“My car is waiting downstairs. Ivan is there,” he said.
I went to the window of Tolya’s Notting Hill house and looked out and saw the car, the driver.
“I have to go,” I said to Fiona, who had been waiting for me when I stumbled in. The guy who’d beaten me up had left me looking bad, but she didn’t ask, just washed off the blood, using some antibiotics she found in Tolya’s bathroom.
“I have to go,” I said to her again, and gave her most of the papers I’d found in Grisha’s office on Moscow Road. Not all. Not the notebook.
“Don’t ask me where, okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Just come,” said Tolya into the phone. “I need you Artyom,” he said. His voice was low and hesitant, like a sick man’s.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said when I found Tolya waiting for me in Larry Sverdloff’s house. From the outside, the house resembled a fortress. A dozen guys were planted in the garden, sitting in deckchairs, speaking into their earpieces, and sipping water. More stood outside the front gate.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Tolya from the chair where he sat in Larry’s study. His skin was gray. He worked hard to catch his breath. I got a chair and pulled it up beside him.
“Where’s your cousin?”
“Upstairs.”
“Let me get him.”
“No,” said Tolya. “He’s fixing things. Let him do it.” He reached for a plastic tube of pills on the table next to him, swallowed a few capsules and washed them down with a glass of vodka he poured himself.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t find my shoes.”
“They’re next to the couch,” I said.
“Can you get them for me, Artyom? Please?”
“Sure.”
I got a pair of his Gucci loafers, bright yellow skins, gold buckles, and brought them to him.
“Sorry to ask, man,” he said, slipping his feet into the shoes. “I’m just a little tired,” added Tolya speaking half in English, half in Russian. “I need to get going.”
In all the years we’d been friends, I had never known Tolya like this. He looked lousy. There was a moment when he clutched his left arm as if in pain, and I reached out, but he gently pushed me away. He spoke to me like a supplicant, like a guy who needed help even with his shoes. I tried not to show what I was feeling, but I think he knew.
“When did you get here?”
“An hour ago,” he said, glancing at his watch. The band was loose on his wrist.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He wore a rumpled black suit.
“Listen to me, I came to see you, and Styopa, too,” he said, referring to his cousin Larry’s patronymic. “Only you two, okay, nothing else, nobody else, no one. Is anyone with you?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I came, you see, because I can’t tell you anything on the phone, not anymore, and because I have to go soon.”
“When?”
“An hour. Two.”
“Where?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I reached in my pocket for cigarettes.
“You’re smoking? Give me one, please?” Tolya said, trying to conceal a rasping cough. “No lecture.”
I lit my cigarette and tossed him the lighter.
“So, Artyom. So. You use my nice lighter?” He tried to joke.
I waited.
“Put on some music, please, Artyom,” said Tolya. “ Something nice.”
There was a CD player in the bookshelf and I went over and found a CD I knew he liked. I held it up.
“Sinatra okay?”
“Always,” said Tolya. “Sure. But classical now, Verdi,” he said. “Larry has this recording, Simon Boccanegra, the Covent Garden version, Tito Gobbi, Victoria de los Angeles, Boris Christoff, please Artyom, it’s on the table,” he added, as if choosing his last record. When I put it on the turntable, Tolya closed his eyes and listened for a few seconds.
“You should listen sometime, Artyom.” He smiled. “It’s about a poisoned drink and reconciliation. Turn it louder, please.”
“You don’t want your cousin to hear?”
“He already knows most of it.”
“Most?”
“I left out certain thi
ngs.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Of course I trust him, it’s for his sake,” said Tolya. “My cousin thinks he is leading the loyal opposition, he thinks he and his people and their money can bring down Putin and the Kremlin. He has made tremendous fortune, billions, so now he hears there is trouble in Ukraine, he supports Orange Revolution, he hears there will be trouble in Georgia this summer, he sends money to what he calls the democratic forces. It makes him a target.” Tolya sat up. “It’s not about him, it’s about you. This is why I came to see you, Artyom. Your fingerprints were all over Val’s place. Excuse me.” He said, hauled himself to his feet like an old man, and slowly made his way out of the room to the bathroom.
“Why did they look for your fingerprints, Artie?” said Tolya when he returned. “Was there a reason?”
“They probably run everything through the computer.”
“Yes, perhaps,” he said, “but people ask questions.”
“Which people?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to warn you.”
I was pretty stunned. I kept my mouth shut.
“By the time I got to New York, they had taken Valentina away,” said Tolya.
“I’m sorry.”
“You tried. Your Mr Roy Pettus is asking about you.”
“I needed his help.”
“You’re naive,” said Tolya softly.
“Just tell me.”
He picked up his glass and sipped the vodka.
“I got to the loft and my Val was gone. Leven, you call him Bobo? He was waiting as if he knew I was coming. It took balls. He sees me, he gets up and doesn’t know what to say, just stands there, this skinny tall boy, long arms hanging down, showing respect, and I think to myself, I should offer my hand. So I put out my hand, and I think he is going to kiss it. ‘I’m sorry, Anatoly Anatolyevich. Please forgive me,’ Leven says in Russian.”
She wasn’t there, of course. They had taken her away. Together they went to the morgue but he couldn’t look at her body.
“I love all my kids, Artie. Val’s sister, of course, and my boy who I almost never see, but she is special. Valentina is like me. She never took shit from anybody. She wanted to do things how she wanted. Even as a little girl when I bring them to Florida from Moscow to be safe, she is a rebel.”
Londongrad Page 22
