At night Brighton Beach turns in on itself. The Batumi, like most of the clubs, had no windows. Out front, radio cabs and limos jammed the street. It was Saturday night. It was four days since Gennadi was killed; it seemed a year.
Standing a few yards from Tolya were a couple of cops I recognized. They were wearing fancy outfits, and when they saw me they looked away uneasily; they were moonlighting as muscle.
“Don’t trust Sverdloff,” Crowe had said. “Ustinov locked him up.”
Local goons in leather—they had leather for brains, some of them—swaggered along the avenue under the El. All wore weapons, some carried streetsweepers. They like knives best in Brighton Beach, though, slice and dice is their stock in trade; connoisseurs use a blowtorch. The Russians leave their signature and I’d seen some of their work.
They have no pretensions about family or honor. They run their business in clans and gangs that splinter and reform according to geography or specialty: Chechens, Ukrainians, Georgians, gas scams, drugs, prostitution. Money’s what matters, but they like the killing.
More men climbed out of limousines and greeted Sverdloff, who, chattering like a tour guide in a rich patter of English and Russian, unstoppable, fluent, made his way into the club, some of the men in his wake. Up close, in the light, he was a giant. Like I said, I’m big, but Sverdloff towered over me.
“Tolya!” people greeted him. “Toi!” they cried, slapping his back, punching his shoulder, kissing him three times on both cheeks.
The Batumi was one of the newer joints. The lobby floor was green marble. A pair of gold plaster nudes stood beside the boutique that sold lobsters, crab and caviar. Sverdloff moved on, wallowing in the attention. A little man in a tux stood on tiptoe to hug him and Sverdloff actually swept the guy off his feet.
“Look on the wall,” Tolya Sverdloff breathed in my ear. With me, he spoke English. He liked showing off his English, except as he got drunker, it got worse. He had already been drinking plenty.
A man in a silk jacket stood in a corner, shouting into a portable phone, one hand stroking a photograph on the wall. Mesmerized, he moved his hand over the naked woman. “ARTISTIC DANCING,” it said in Russian, “THE INIMITABLE ANNA K.”
The stripper on The Teddy Flowers Show?”
Tolya nodded. “We’ll see her perform, then pay her a visit. OK?”
“You know this broad?”
Tolya grinned. “I’m from Odessa. This is New York City. Everybody knows everybody. You will meet her. It will be interesting for you.”
I followed him up the stairs. He turned.
“Did you know Ustinov locked me up once?” he asked cheerfully as we got to the club.
“How come? You talked too much?”
“I tried to screw my guitar on stage at a rock concert in Tallinn. I was quite a big star. Big as Gribenshikov. For fifteen minutes.” Sverdloff laughed. “After your time.”
Sverdloff’s laughter was sucked up by the noise in the main room. He moved in quickly, gracefully, working his way into the heaving crowd.
The walls of the Batumi were made of mirrors. At one side was a bar, at the other a bandstand where a group in silver tuxes played cover versions of Beatles tunes.
On the dance floor men in silk suits, guns under their jackets, moved lightly with babes in tight leather skirts. The men’s shirts were silk too, the collars spread over their lapels. They were meticulous dressers and they flicked those collars into place incessantly; their fingers were thick with rings and the nails manicured. And they could dance.
The crowd made room for the best dancers, and they were light on their feet and loose in the hip. They knew all the steps. These were not Moscow intellectuals or Manhattan Jews. They were voluptuaries from the wrong side of the Urals and they really could dance.
“You want to drink something?” Tolya asked formally and we went to the bar.
Around the dance floor people sat at long tables and ate. The tables were jammed with food: smoked fish, chopped liver, pickled walnuts, pickled mushrooms, ham, salami, headcheese, herring, red caviar, black caviar, black bread, and Russian salad, the carrots and peas suspended in bright yellow mayonnaise. There were forests of vodka bottles and Coke cans. People leaned on the table, shouting in Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Yiddish. An elderly woman made sandwiches out of bread and fish, wrapped them in Kleenex, then inserted them methodically into her large plastic handbag.
“Mama’s got a great big bag,” Tolya shouted and leaned on me, laughing.
In the darker corners, men moved restlessly, shadows reflected in the mirrors. It reminded me of the time, on a case in Crown Heights, I went into a Hasidic synagogue. There, too, the men wandered, gossiped, prayed, even selling stuff they had hidden in those mysterious deep black pockets. It was as alien to me as a mosque and so was this. Russians I had known, in my Moscow, people like my parents, intellectuals, ate at home at the kitchen table. Here, I could speak the language, but I couldn’t read the meaning.
Sverdloff stopped in front of the bar and hailed the bartender. He stared at me for a minute.
“What?” I said.
“How’s your face?”
“Lousy.”
“Be careful. This guy will come after you again.”
“I’ll take my bodyguard even when I go for a piss.”
Sverdloff ordered brandy. I asked for beer.
“What do you know about Gavin Crowe?”
Sverdloff shuddered. “Nasty piece of goods. Also, the father. I met the father. He did some small business for the KGB. Dirty business. You met him, you wanted a bath afterwards.”
“Where is he?”
“He is dead. Do you know what one hit costs these days?” Sverdloff asked me. He was really knocking back the brandy.
“Is this a riddle?”
“Someone reliable, two hundred. First-class hitman, two grand. Plus one return ticket to Moscow. Plus maybe a night to lie low in Miami. Two thousand American smackers,” he added and I noted that his slang was out of date and felt superior. I said something in Russian.
“In English, Artyom. It’s safer around here. I will tell you, Artyom, however, this doesn’t feel like a simple mafia hit, Ustinov. No, I don’t believe this. It feels wrong.” He spoke softly.
“What feels wrong?”
“You have information you want to share? Maybe I can help?”
I didn’t answer.
“Let’s drink,” he said.
Under my feet I could feel the floor vibrate with the moving crowd. At a table in front of us was a sedate party of well-dressed men and women. Sverdloff followed my gaze.
“Slumming,” he said. “From across the bridge to view the goods. Armani Jews. To see how they spend their many dollars.”
“What?”
“Where you been hiding? Look, I am no anti-Semite. My wife is Jew. My kids, therefore, are Jew. But a Russki arrives in this country, he is Jewish, he got friends. First time in Russian history people want to be Jew. Sure, why not? New Jews arrive in America they get cash, medical treatment, help with houses. They are very smart cookies.”
“That doesn’t make them gangsters.” I could tell Sverdloff was plenty drunk because he was dropping articles like a comic-book Russian.
“Sure. Sure. But Russian hood with Jew on his passport gets the same deal as every other Jew. Say I am a Jewish engineer. I cannot find work. I say I am fearful of the mood in my country—communists return, Yeltsin leaving, fascists coming, nationalists, army junta, anti-Semites. I wish to come to America. I omit the fact I am also running extortion ring in Kiev. I arrive. Work hard. Learn English. Few years later, I am set up again. Anyone makes a fuss, Jewish organizations start screaming. In Brighton Beach, no one talks. Who will talk? Everyone is afraid of reprisals back home. Just like before. Nothing changes.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.” I felt depressed. The band launched into a Stevie Wonder medley.
The mirrored bar ran the whole length of the
room. Dozens of men leaned on it. Tolya Sverdloff looked completely at home; he drank French brandy, calling loudly for VSOP brands by name. With one hand, he sampled snacks of fish and caviar from a platter on the bar, the other, he planted on my shoulder with jovial bonhomie. I wanted to shake loose, but this was ritual for him.
“It took Italians three, four generations to penetrate legitimate society. These guys, it’s already happening. Smart guys. PhDs. We Russians are good at paperwork. Paper money.” He shook with laughter.
“Who does the dirty work?”
“Look around. They got Olympic weightlifters retired from the Soviet team. They got Israeli commandos not retired. The KGB is also helpful. Scary combo,” Sverdloff said, admiring himself in a mirror.
“I read that in Vanity Fair,” I said.
The lights went out. There was a drum roll. I drank my beer. Acrobats in tights flipped out of the darkness into the colored lights. The show had begun.
The Tom Jones clone followed, then gilded birdcages descended from the ceiling and three girls emerged, dressed in feathers. They were jugglers, but I couldn’t see what it was they were tossing around.
Sverdloff looked up. “Stuffed birds,” he said.
I asked for Scotch.
“So you were godson to the general,” Tolya said. “Listen to me, and watch the table in the corner.” He gulped his brandy noisily.
At a round table on a raised platform were eight men all dressed in dark suits and white shirts. They spoke quietly among themselves.
“Petrol,” Tolya said. “Gas scams, you say. Medical insurance fraud. You know how much they skim this way? Millions. Billions. They prefer to rip off little people. You know this saying, ‘Better steal one dollar from a million people than a million dollars from one person’.”
The men in the dark suits barely touched their vodka. There was only one woman at the table. A tall blonde in a plain silk shirt, hair netted low on her neck in an old-fashioned chignon, she had the exquisite affected posture of a flamenco dancer. Men who stopped to pay court to the suits, first kissed her hand. I couldn’t stop looking.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said. “This is Marina, cousin of Elem Zeitsev’s wife. You know Zeitsev?”
The smell of bodies and spilled booze, perfume and corruption was oppressive and so were the crude Russian voices. I knew who Zeitsev was, of course, but I let Sverdloff go on, insisting over and over this was the safest place to talk. He liked the risk. He got off on intrigue.
Sweating, I pulled off my jacket, and got a Coke. Sverdloff couldn’t shut up. As the show went on and on, the jugglers followed by the fire-eaters and the tap-dancing midgets, he delivered his spiel on Brighton Beach: how the Brooklyn resort named in the 1870s for the English seaside town became a poor Jew neighborhood, as Sverdloff put it; how in the 1970s when Nixon and Brezhnev invented détente, forty thousand new ones arrived, including all the criminals in the jails. The big KGB joke: You want them? Take them, the KGB said and opened the jails and sent the garbage into the American bloodstream like a plague.
Sure, there were real immigrants, real dissidents, but also thieves, rapists, murderers, as there had been during the Mariel boat lift when Fidel did the same thing in Cuba.
The band played “Born in the USA”. Sverdloff talked about the rackets, the trade in currency, raw materials, diapers, newsprint. He claimed he once knew Agron, the first Godfather, the old thug who parked his gun at the baths on the Lower East Side then got journalists to write it up. Agron was gunned down across the street from the Batumi. Sverdloff claimed he also knew Balagula. I yawned.
“You don’t like it here?” Tolya said. “You prefer somewhere else better?” he asked, and I told him I liked a bar on Broome Street a whole better but it was only conversation.
Losing Sverdloff in the noise, I thought about the cleaner, the Ivan, the man who killed Gennadi Ustinov. Who was he? Was he here hidden in the crowd?
“Come on,” Tolya said, reaching into a bowl on the bar for a handful of hard-boiled eggs. “I want to eat some dinner while we watch the grand finale.” He made for a small table that was empty, signaled a waiter who brought shashlik on a skewer and the band broke into a version of “I Just Called to Say I Love You”.
A male chorus line in Czarist military outfits, all holding telephones, pirouetted onto the floor, their tights stuffed with socks to make their cocks bigger. A chorus line of Vronskys, I figured, as the noise of a train came over the loudspeaker and a girl in a hooded cape swept in, and was announced as the inimitable Anna K.
“You think Tolstoy would have approved?” I whispered but Sverdloff didn’t hear. I was crying from laughing.
Anna K, whose real name was Olga Gross, began her routine. She was good. Real good. Most topless clubs these days, even fancy ones like Stringfellow’s place, the girls take their clothes off so unceremoniously they could be going to the toilet—dress off, tits in your face, ass up, twenty bucks. Smile. Time is money. But Olga took her time. I was impressed.
She removed the cape first, then the long white gloves, one at a time, the hat, the veil. She peeled real slow—a scarf, a tight-waisted jacket that had a million buttons. She undid each one. Then the skirt. Underneath was a petticoat, a corset. She released one breast at a time. She stroked herself slowly. The men in the audience were panting. I was panting. Olga had a dull face and a sulky manner, but she had a sensational body. When she was naked except for a G-string, the silk stockings and high heels, she pulled the cloak around her and headed in our direction. Tolya was sweating. He had stopped eating.
The girl leaned into him, whipping his face with her long hair, flicking her large breasts, the nipples rigid, over his jacket front, then, lightly, over his face. The music got louder. She tossed away the G-string. Strobe lights came on. In a frenzy, the girl threw herself on the floor in front of him, legs wide, and seemed to pull him down on top of her.
The lights came up. Olga had disappeared. Tolya wiped his face and finished his food. Then he said, “Let’s go.”
At the back of the club were the dressing rooms and when Sverdloff barged into one of them, we found a naked woman cross-legged on the ground, eating a hamburger and shielding her breasts from the grease with paper towels. Ten or twelve women were in the locker room, some naked, some half dressed. The girl with the burger looked up impassively, then went back to her dinner.
The corridor was lit by a couple of bare bulbs and it stank of booze. A few men loitered.
From the fourth door down came the sound of shrill voices. A man in a gray silk suit emerged and disappeared. The door remained open. We went in.
Inside, her costume on the floor, was Olga Gross. She wore a dirty pink bra and faded Jordache jeans.
Looking up from the cot where she sat, she saw Sverdloff and ran to him. She wound her arms around his neck in a hammerlock and clung to him like iron on a magnet.
“Oh, Tolya, you will help me?” She spoke in Russian.
“Of course. Sure. But first you will help us.”
She put a sweater on, then groped for her glasses on a table littered with make-up and cigarette butts. Without the costume, Olga Gross was a plain woman.
“Tell my friend what happened on the TV show.”
“I can speak Russian?”
I nodded.
She hesitated.
Tolya said, “Olga, remember what I promised.”
She nodded and scratched her face; there were bad herpes and the sores around her mouth showed dried blood. “I have seen the murderer who shot the general. I have seen him before.”
“Where?” I wondered why she would talk.
“I tell you this because, like Ustinov, my father was also a general,” she said, tossing her limp hair from her face.
Sure, I thought. Him and George Patton and Charles de Gaulle, but I kept my mouth shut.
“A few weeks ago, here in the Batumi Club. He was bothering me all night, but he looked poor, you know? He wore stone-washed
jeans,” she sneered. “Two nights before the TV show, he was again here, in a silk suit, Versace style. Versace.”
“You’re very observant,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“What color was it? The suit?”
“Blue. Green. I’m not sure.”
“Where would he get a suit like that around here?”
She looked nervously at the door. “Two or three tailors. I could get you the names, but tomorrow.”
“Why should I believe you?”
She looked imploringly at Tolya. “You said.”
“How did you get on the TV show, Olga? Who invited you?”
She shrugged. “The woman with red hair. Miss Hanes. And her friend. She was not nice to me. She would not give me a dressing room for the show.”
“What friend?”
“The Englishman.” Crowe, I thought. Lily and Crowe.
Sverdloff took my arm. “Give me five minutes with her.”
I talked to Tolya direct, but loud, so she could hear. I ignored Olga like she was nothing. I behaved like a Russian man. My mouth tasted of bile.
“I want the tailor’s name. Tonight. You tell her. Tell her. I want the name. I want to know everyone she saw. Whatever you promised her to get her to talk, it can wait until she gives me something.” I was angry at Lily and I took it out on this miserable girl. “Also, I want an agreement she testifies if we need her. In court.” I watched as the girl crouched in front of her mirror.
An expression, half terror, half cunning, crossed her thin sallow face. Her lips were encrusted with traces of dried blood. A purplish lesion on her forehead was covered with the wrong color make-up. Olga picked up the vodka bottle, put her head back and swilled it like medicine. Her eyes watered.
“You ask a lot.”
“Her visa runs out next week,” I lied. “I checked. She wants to stay, she talks. She testifies. You hear me?”
Red Mercury Blues Page 7
