“Excuse me?”
“You heard.” I put money on the table and crushed my cigarette in the dumplings.
“I tell you this only because you also cared for Gennadi Mikhailovich.”
The man used Uncle Gennadi’s patronymic with real respect. All conversation had stopped. It was so quiet in the restaurant you could hear the man eating kasha swallow.
“We understand how you feel because your Uncle Gennadi as you called him was our friend also.”
I sat where I was. The man took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose and I saw he was blind in one eye.
He put the glasses back and stared at me. “I think it would be better if you go home.”
But I didn’t go. I didn’t reply. The man returned to his table and waited for my next move.
I waited. But for what? For Gennadi’s killer to walk in and ask for borscht? Looking for evidence of the mafia in Brighton Beach was like looking for Elvis in Memphis: it was everywhere and nowhere. In Brighton Beach, people would tell you there is no mafia. Mainly mafia is Chechens in Moscow, they say. They spat when they said it: Caucasians were dog turds, although after Grozny there was more respect.
The waitress ignored me. She had big tits, a big ass, stone-washed jeans, plenty of gold around her leathery neck. She had tried flirting at first, but I didn’t play and she figured I was a snob. I tuned in to a pair of women at the next table. They were eating chocolates from a large box on their table, gossiping.
“He gave me diamond earrings.”
“Mine gave me a big diamond Rolex. Fake, like him.”
“Stupid prick.”
Next to the bar where a babushka smeared circles on the counter with a dirty rag, a beaded curtain jiggled in the breeze from the air conditioner. Through it, I could see a rack with leathers, furs, stuff someone had hijacked at the airport.
I had fought Sonny about coming here, and here I was. Is that how he wanted it? Planned it? Did he know in his gut even before I did I would go after Ustinov’s killer?
The women picked through the chocolates, inspecting each piece, biting one, discarding candies they didn’t like, dreaming of gold and diamonds. They whined, they shouted. Gimme candy. Gimme Rolex. Gimme gimme. I felt lousy. What I hated most was it was always what I expected: the crude comic book of Russian life, half remembered. What did all this have to do with Uncle Gennadi?
“Can I get a cup of coffee please?” I called to the sullen waitress.
“No more coffee,” the waitress said in Russian.
“OK. Tea.”
She brought tea in a thick mug.
“I’d like a glass.” Tea in a glass reminds me of my mother. Also, I wanted to annoy the waitress.
“No glass.”
The men watched. I finished my tea. I counted my money again. I wiped my mouth. I took a toothpick and inserted it in my teeth and smiled at the women. The place was electric with anxiety. No one spoke.
I was not going to leave because some self-important little hood told me to, whoever he was, however the hell he knew my name, but I was scared. Memorising the faces around me as best I could, I counted up to a hundred, then I lit a cigarette and smoked it to the butt, crushed it out, got up, put on my jacket, pocketed my cigarettes and moseyed to the door. I turned to the bookkeeper. “I’ll be back,” I said.
He smiled, this tight, mirthless Russian smile.
“Life, as your beloved mother always told you, Artyom, is not a movie,” he said and, as I got through the door, I knew that someone had been waiting outside the restaurant all the time, watching me, waiting for me. I turned my collar up against the warm drizzle that had started again, that carried with it the stink of some heavy cologne, the kind for men who swagger and wear jewellery and leather coats.
It hung on me, the smell. Sometimes it is like a movie, that’s the trouble, I thought, walking slowly away from the Arena, trying not to show I was scared rigid, sensing men on my back. I could feel them, watching from the café window.
Light from Fish Town where I got the caviar for Dawn’s wedding—another life, it already felt like—spilled on the wet pavement. In the windows there were dead slabs of smoked fish crammed together: pink salmons, white chubs with mottled gold skins, translucent sturgeon slices expensive as fur coats. Bright green pickles in barrels of brine stood next to black breads that weighed like warheads.
A silver Jaguar pulled up, a man in leather got out, went in, picked up a blue can of caviar, tossed it from hand to hand. He paid with a wad of cash, then got back in his car.
“Everything is cash around here,” a cop I knew once told me. “Safety deposit boxes are what you could call the financial tool of choice.”
In front of me, a woman in a Ninja Turtle sweatshirt caught her heel in the tar. Her brown suitcase opened and food fell out, apples bouncing on the pavement. An old man selling piroshki from a cart laughed and laughed. No one tried to help. I went over, but she grabbed her stuff and hurried away. You didn’t mess in people’s business here.
I could still smell him, smell the cologne, and I climbed up on the boardwalk that runs parallel to Brighton Beach Avenue. I wanted to lure him into action, get it over with. I walked. Someone followed. On my right was a crumbling housing project Russians call the Great Wall of China. It kept the schwarzes on the other side, they crowed.
The boardwalk was deserted, the only lights from ships a million miles out on the horizon. Behind me, footsteps drummed faster on the wet boards, someone following me carelessly, brazenly. I walked faster.
Sweat oozed off my head. He came after me. I could smell the cologne. I took another breath and grasped the screwdriver in my pocket. I could feel his breath on my neck. I spun around hard to surprise him, to face whatever monster was waiting for me.
5
“Hi.”
A huge man in a black leather coat hailed me cheerfully. He wore a Dodgers baseball cap backwards on a square head big as an Easter Island statue. He had black hair in a ponytail, pockmarked skin and light gray eyes. When he smiled, which he was busy doing, an incongruous dimple appeared in his chin. I figured he was about my age. I’m pretty big, but he must have been six five and he weighed maybe three hundred pounds, but he was solid.
“I said how are you?” he said to me in Russian.
“Fuck off,” I said. I was beginning to sound like them.
“Sverdloff, actually. Sverdloff, Anatoly. Tolya usually for friends,” the man said, switching to English. He made a mock bow. “I am not going to fuck off, unless you are going with me. I have been trying to call you every hour.” The voice was educated, familiar.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, but I knew. I remembered his name. Lily Hanes had told me. Sverdloff was the DJ on The Flowers Show. He was also the Russian on my answering machine, I realized, and I started walking fast again, towards Coney Island where the big wheel loomed in the wet shadows. Sverdloff kept pace with me.
“You’ve been following me.”
“Yes. You don’t take my telephone calls,” he said. “I have things to talk about.” He looked like a hood. He could have been a weightlifter. But except for occasional lapses, he spoke the elegant English you learned at the Moscow language schools.
Puffing a joint, he blew sweet-smelling marijuana into the damp night air.
“Shall we go for a ride?” He pointed at the ferris wheel. “Up there?”
“What do you think this is, The Third Man? I’m busy. Say what you have to say and go. And get rid of the dope. It’s illegal,” I said, feeling irritable, sounding pompous.
Sverdloff flicked the joint towards the sand, making it spin like a pebble on a pond, looked over his shoulder and kept walking.
“So?”
“I was on The Teddy Flowers Show last night.”
“I got that.”
“I am quite a famous Russian.”
“Sure you are.”
He shrugged, his expression neutral. This one did not threaten or tug his f
orelock like the cab driver; there was no fear. “You want to talk, OK. You don’t want to talk, also OK. But there are things you should know,” he said and pulled a piece of paper with a number out of his pocket. “You feel like talking, call me, please,” he added, waved and walked away, lighting up another joint.
I smelled the disease and the presence of death even before I felt the ice-cold steel disturb the molecules near my cheek. It was deadly quiet on Brighton 6th Street where I had parked the car. No one would come.
As I opened the car door, someone rammed me so hard I was trapped. I couldn’t stop the huge force and I fell onto the seat. He punched me, then reached over and yanked out the car-phone and hooked the webbed seat belt under my neck and held it. I could taste blood in my mouth where he’d knocked a tooth out. Blood filled my mouth. I gagged on the blood. With the other hand he used the knife, turning the flat cold blade against my skin until I felt liquid run down my cheek. Then he seemed to fondle my neck, my cheek, my forehead with spindly brittle fingers. He grasped my hair by the roots, grunting with effort. I could just see dark glasses, a blue watch cap on the edges of vision. I got the sense of a pale Slavic face for an instant, but he put the knife in my eye and I couldn’t see at all. I could feel the point of the knife in my eye as it grazed the surface.
I began gasping. I heard footsteps. They receded. Out here, no one would help. On Brighton Beach, you could commit murder in broad daylight in view of a dozen people drinking tea and later every one would claim all they had seen was their glass.
The creep held my head and twisted it so the pulse in my neck pounded. His breath was putrid, and I gagged as he moved the knife back and forth across my face, then my eyelids. He mumbled something in Russian, but I was losing oxygen and couldn’t hear. A picture floated in front of my eyes of a wounded soldier on Omaha Beach, his eyeball sliding down his cheek. I was half unconscious; the creep had my windpipe. Then I heard him.
“I can arrange so you never see your children again,” he said. The voice was highpitched. He spoke in Russian.
The creep’s accent was crude, but I knew what he meant: it was a standard mafia threat. They didn’t kill you the first time, they threw acid in your eyes so you never saw your children or anyone else because you had become a blind man. Or they cut off your lids so you could never blink, never sleep, never weep.
Somehow I got air in my lungs.
“I don’t have any children,” I said.
Warm blood dripped on my face. It was humid, viscous, sticky, mixed with saliva. I heard something metallic clatter on the side of the car then fall onto the sidewalk.
“Don’t be a smartass,” someone else said in Russian, this time in a cultured accent.
The seat belt snapped back in place. The creep’s arm flopped like a rag doll’s for a second, then whatever held him up let go, and he bounced away into the gutter and lay there, breathing hard.
“Sverdloff, Anatoly.” The voice boomed cheerfully, switching to English: “Remember me?”
It was the goddamn Russian. I needed another Russian like I need a third tit.
“Shall I kill him, please?”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll get help.” But the phone was out.
“You’re OK?”
In the split second Sverdloff took to make sure I was alive, the creep summoned some kind of animal will, got out of the gutter and ran down the alley into the dark.
Sverdloff went after him. It was no contest. He came back, panting.
“OK. Thank you. Now I owe you. What do you want?” My face hurt like hell.
“I believe this is yours,” he said and bowed and presented me with my tooth on his ham-sized hand, like a waiter with a platter. The guy was a joker. He smoothed his coat. “Bastard! You want me to drive you home? You look lousy.”
A couple came towards us, laughing, arms linked. When they saw us, they saw trouble and turned abruptly and went in the other direction.
“No.” I didn’t want anyone around. I didn’t want a Russian around. Any Russian. OK, so he helped me. But I knew I owed him now.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to find the creep who killed Ustinov. Also the piece of shit who attacked me.”
“Same guy?”
“How would I know?” I said. But I knew.
“I think this too. We can talk?” he said.
“Sure. Talk.”
“Not now. Go home. Clean up. I’ll call you soon. You know the Batumi?”
“The nightclub? Why there?”
“Perhaps I can introduce you to someone interesting. Also, I like noisy places. When you talk, it’s safest to sit where you can see the enemy.”
“I haven’t heard that kind of paranoid crap for years.”
Whipping a pristine handkerchief out of his pocket, Sverdloff picked up the knife and delivered it to me.
“You’ve been away from home too long,” he said and set off back towards Brighton Beach, the leather coat billowing cheerfully, like a Halloween costume.
6
What was left of that night, like some homeless bum, my old raincoat over me, I slept in the car. Lay in the back seat, really, pieces of Kleenex stuck on my bloody face, listening to rain hit the roof. Heroic I wasn’t; I had been too shaky to drive home. But I didn’t want the big Russian around with his talk of going home to Moscow.
I felt instinctively that the creep who cut me probably killed Ustinov or had been set up by the same people. It meant he probably knew my connection to Gennadi; either that or he had been following me. When did he start following me? At the café? At the hospital even?
The creep’s bony fingers when they caressed my face had been bare; there would be prints on the knife.
I lay in the back seat of the car thinking how Brighton Beach could suck you up and leave you for dead.
In the night, the rain stopped.
As soon as it was light I went down to the ocean, took off my shirt, washed my face in the salt water. It made my face sting and I was running a fever. There were some Band-Aids in the glove compartment and I stuck them on my face, then I found a payphone next to Nathan’s up on Coney Island. I got coffee, but I still felt like I slept in a toilet and I needed help. Maxine Crabbe was at home and said OK, she’d look at the knife. But Maxie, who’s in forensics and a friend, sounded reluctant. Maybe she thought I was going to come on to her.
Instead of the highway, I drove back through Brooklyn’s interior. A few Hasidic joggers were out early on, running for God. When I got to the deserted federal building all I saw were some destitute old guys snuggled up to the statuary.
“You all right, fella?” The guard recognized me and he was solicitous. I told him I had fallen off my bike and feigned embarrassment. He let me go up.
Eddie was on duty and I said I’d left my briefcase and he let me into Sonny’s office. He didn’t believe me but he didn’t like Sonny and I had a couple of spare Knicks tickets for the coming season; his grandkids were fans.
From the end of the hall near Sonny’s office I could hear the click and buzz of a printer; someone was at work early. But Rhonda kept her office impeccably and I found the filebox with Ustinov’s name on it easily in a credenza next to her desk. The video was inside. I took it. There was the sound of footsteps outside the office and I closed the filebox and put it away as the door opened softly.
“Hello, detective.” It was Roy Pettus.
I moved into the hallway where he stood and closed the door behind me. I had the video in my hand. Pettus didn’t mention it.
“You need a doctor?” He looked closely at me.
“Scratches is all,” I said.
“I hear maybe you fell off your bike.” He cracked a small smile. “What about some coffee?”
Agent Pettus did not appear a voluble man or a sociable one, so the offer of coffee surprised me.
“Not here,” he said.
We left the building silently.
We went to a coffee
shop near the Promenade. Some gulls were doing advanced t’ai chi over the river.
“You’re up early,” I said inanely.
Pettus was silent.
“You fellows situate yourself where you want and I’ll be right with you,” said the waitress. She had a face as used as her hair.
The place was almost empty, except for a taxi driver in a turban eating pancakes and an elderly couple making eyes at each other over the ninety-nine-cent breakfast; maybe they couldn’t sleep much either.
Roy Pettus folded his jacket once, laid it carefully on the booth and slid in next to it. I sat down opposite.
When the coffee came, he leaned forward slightly. Without any melodrama he said, “What I been considering telling you is we think someone is after you.”
“Who is it?” I asked, pulling a cigarette from the pack in my pocket.
“You mind not smoking?” Pettus said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I been trying to quit. It’s a bitch.”
As we exchanged civilities, my heart raced. Cut to the chase, I thought, but I knew Pettus would take his time. He ordered a toasted English muffin. I drank some coffee. My teeth hurt like hell.
“Could I please have marmalade instead of that grape jelly?” he asked the waitress.
Come on!
“You got a name?”
“No.”
I tried not to panic. I needed a smoke. “You’re telling me you heard this stuff even before Ustinov was murdered?”
“Could be. People been sniffing around. Someone accesses your file. Wants your file under the Freedom of Information Act. You believe in synchronicity?”
“Sure.”
Pettus grinned. “Course, we don’t just send the file. Normally, we drag our butts. Then we send it with the good stuff blacked out. This time, we got orders for a rush job, orders from somewhere we couldn’t refuse.”
“When?”
“Two, three weeks ago. That mean anything?”
“Around the time I got the letter Ustinov was coming.”
“He wrote you?”
“Through his book editor. A guy name of Frye.”
Red Mercury Blues Page 4
