Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Most sample merchants never go beyond the border towns where they hand over their stuff, he told me, but he was different. Lev wanted more. He hated the Saturdays in muddy market towns on the Croatian border, hated the peasants who stank, hated pretending to buy and sell spare tires and dusty vegetables.

  “Once, Lev went even farther. Once, he did the trip down to the Mediterranean, then Sierra Leone. He hated it. It meant doing business with Lebanese who run the ports there, who, it is said, work for Hizbollah, people Lev detests as much as Jews. In Africa he handed over his samples. Someone else took them by sea to Mexico. It was Lev’s biggest adventure.” Tolya stopped and licked his lips. “I need a drink.”

  “Do you believe this?”

  “Yes.” Tolya waved for a waiter. None came. He went and got a bottle of red wine from the bar.

  “At some point, Lev begins getting ideas. He decides he will be the first to transport samples into New York.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “Probably. He decides to travel direct. Moscow airport was easy, he says. A few dollars to the right people, his luggage went directly to the plane without inspection. A nice young lady escorts him to the VIP lounge where there are no metal detectors and offers him French champagne. He asks for Russian.”

  “He asks for Russian?”

  “Yes. Says Russian champagne is better.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He chooses to fly through Frankfurt. You know why?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He recalls the Pan Am plane that crashed over Lockerbie stopped in Frankfurt. He remembers transit passenger luggage that is interlined is rarely inspected in Frankfurt. Not that it matters to Lev. Most of what he carries cannot be detected by X-ray, and the other he carries over his shoulder. On board, he sips his wine. He muses that if the plane goes down, the explosion will be much bigger than Lockerbie.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Yes,” Tolya said and I wondered if he knew. “But smart. At JFK there are no metal detectors for passengers disembarking.”

  I was sweating. The house with the girl playing a flute. Olga. The radioactive material in a fake Samsonite suitcase.

  “Lev settles in. Soon he goes shopping.”

  “Shopping.”

  “Yes. He tells me New York City is filled with knives, everywhere you can buy beautiful knives. One knife he lost. He buys another. Then he confides in me. He wants to use this knife on some Jew who is after him. He hints. He is testing me.”

  “So you pass the hate the Jews test.”

  “Yes. In his room at this Palace Hotel, I notice a nice laptop computer. “I got it off a Jew cop,” he brags. He tells me how sometimes he goes to this sweatshop opposite the Jew’s building and watches him like he is at the movies. Jews are soft, he says. Idle American Jews. He wants to kill a Jew.”

  “How did he pick up I was involved?”

  Tolya shrugged. “A man with glasses, maybe. A hood, one of your own guys who works both sides of the street.”

  “You think every cop has his hand out here, like Russia?” I was furious because he was probably right. “So you saw this suitcase he was using for some kind of arsenal?”

  “I’m getting there.” Tolya ignored the sarcasm. “The small suitcase has a false bottom. Underneath, containers with pellets of enriched uranium. Plutonium scraps inserted into steel disks resembling hockey pucks. Soluble salts of cesium in a thick lead jar. In the carry-on bag, three glass vials filled with a suspension of red mercury. Maybe more.” As he recited the list, Tolya’s face was slick with sweat; this stuff worried even Anatoly Sverdloff.

  “He showed me the certificates. The stuff is authentic”

  “Who wants it?”

  “Anyone who wants to make a bomb. For terrorists, samples are delivered as proof the seller has access to the goods. For small-time hoods, samples are good for ransom. For bribes. I showed Lev I was impressed.”

  “You looked at the stuff?”

  “I saw enough.” Tolya shrugged and knocked back more wine. “What choice did I have? I wanted him to believe in me.”

  The bar was almost empty and Tolya drank two glasses straight down.

  “What about his contacts?”

  “I told you, they cut him loose.”

  “Why?”

  “I was coming to that. Zeitsev’s people are not stupid. They cut him loose because Lev made one very big mistake.” Tolya paused and slurped down the dregs of his wine.

  “What mistake?”

  “He killed General Ustinov.”

  3

  The pieces were spread out like a jigsaw I couldn’t put together: the knife, Roy Pettus’ conversation with the customs inspector who was a Polack, his hints about nukes, Maxine’s coy warnings, the creep following me, maybe from the beginning, following Lily because of me, now this. I said to Tolya, “You really think he killed Ustinov?”

  “Yes. But it was a sideshow,” he said. “Except that it put you in the frame.”

  “And Lily also.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Sverdloff tossed some money on the table and said, “Let’s walk.”

  “Where is he? Where is he?” I had my hands on Sverdloff’s neck, but he shook me off like a bug on a bull. “Where the hell is he?”

  “Waiting for me to get the money for him. Back in Brighton Beach waiting to cash in.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “You do that, we don’t get the stuff.”

  We walked silently down Broadway. He was holding out on me.

  “How come he trusts you?” I asked Sverdloff again. He stopped at a flea market that was still open, operating under a stand of lights.

  “He wants to sell the stuff. I promised him money for his father. I made him trust me. He’s a believer, this Lev. His kind never give it up. He wants to believe. He has no one else. So he believes me.”

  “How do you know he’ll deliver?”

  “He needs the money.” Wandering among the insomniacs who shopped at midnight in the flea markets on Broadway, Tolya picked up a painted matrioshka off a stall and held it close to his amused face. Along with imitation Rolexes and fake Vuitton bags and Jimi Hendrix T-shirts, Russian dolls had become a staple of flea markets. I glanced around at the insomniacs who stood idly, smoking. He could be here, this Lev. He could be anywhere I was.

  The creep trusted Tolya Sverdloff for the same reason I was going to trust him; I had no choice. Tolya was an operator. He bargained, cajoled, plundered stalls for what he wanted, his huge face white like a misshapen moon made of floury dough.

  There were a couple of old Blue Note albums on a stall, but the discs were scratched. Tolya wrapped the leather coat around him and tried on a Nigerian cap. The stall owner chatted, smiled, offered discounts. I saw Tolya was smooth enough to have been one of Ustinov’s men in the old days.

  “You remember when you first read Nineteen Eighty-Four?” Tolya said idly. “For me, it’s the biggest deal in my life except when first hearing Beatles, maybe, or first fuck. Penguin edition. White and orange. A guy in my class gives it to me. I’m standing in the stinking school toilet, I know this is provocation, you could go to jail for reading Orwell. This boy, he’s named Patrice for Lumumba, pulls it out of his waistband. “Wanna try it, Toi?” Bang! Like a gun. Like dirty pictures. I read it. Next day, I knew everything was fake.”

  “I always knew. I drew wigs on Lenin in my school book. I listened to Voice of America on short wave.”

  “Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour?” Tolya smiled nostalgically.

  “Yeah. Well, it’s swell reminiscing with you about the bad old days, but you want to tell me why you didn’t grab him, this Lev you dreamed up?”

  “How? Because he only showed me some of what he’s got. Because we got to get that suitcase and I need the money to get it. Because,” Tolya said, inspecting a secondhand Nikon, “I’m only a Russian tourist and who will believe me?” He put do
wn the camera, paid for the hat and headed towards the street. A chilly breeze blew.

  “So what’s this red mercury?”

  Sverdloff stopped under a street light. “The worst thing ever made. Worse than plutonium. More lethal. Heavier. A few ounces, you can make a nuclear bomb big enough to blow up a city.”

  “And hair grows on billiard balls.”

  “You think this is crazy Russian stuff? You think this is sci-fi? You think I am a dickhead dumb-ox Russki? You think if it doesn’t go boom it won’t kill you, you think it can’t be made of ordinary shit, literally, what about the bomb in Oklahoma City? You think if it’s small-time creeps like Lev with a suitcase it’s a joke. What? You will only believe if there is a big warhead, plenty of hardware, a cast of thousands. OK. Boom!” He shouted so that half the people in the street turned round. “Boom!” He grabbed my sleeve. “You been away too long to believe there are people who do this stuff? You have been living with your head up your behind, Mr American Policeman.”

  It was what Sonny Lippert always said.

  “This is only the beginning. Let him get away with this there will be more, much more. You think it can’t happen? Do you think a scientist whose kids are starving in some hellhole in the Caucasus won’t sell plutonium scraps for a few bucks to feed them? Come to Moscow and I will make you a believer.”

  “Not on your goddamn life,” I said. It was almost cold out but I was hot with panic.

  “Suit yourself. But watch your back, OK? He’s following you. He’s dangerous.”

  “Jesus! What else?”

  “He is sick. Very sick. He doesn’t care who he hurts. He’s a loose cannon out there and he’s dying.”

  “How much money does he want?”

  “Ten thousand only. You want me to arrange it? Get me the money, I’ll arrange it.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Think fast.”

  “Or?”

  “Hunt him down and kill him,” said Tolya Sverdloff.

  The next morning, it was after ten when I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I went to the window and shoved it open and a blast of cold air hit me. Across the street, in the window of the sweatshop, two Asian women sat sewing bridal veils. The young one smiled at me and waved. She could see into my window perfectly. It would be where Lev had sat at night, watching me.

  He knew my address. He had my computer. He knew my name and face and friends. He had seen me with Olga, with Genia. Lily. He had watched me through my window at night from across the street; my life was his TV show.

  And he was sick. He told Tolya he was sick and he had cut me and bled on me. I picked up the phone, but who could I call? I was unofficial, Sonny Lippert had cut me off, even Roy Pettus was reluctant to take my calls. At Danny Guilfoyle’s no one answered. Dan was probably out on his boat. If only I could get to Danny, I thought. I put Miles Davis playing “Kind of Blue” on and thought about eating. Instead, I got a beer out of the icebox and sat on a kitchen stool.

  “You can’t go on like this, man,” Ricky said. I had forgotten he was coming over for breakfast. He grabbed the beer out of my hand and switched off the stereo. “That music could kill you this early.”

  “My little geisha,” I said. Thank God for Ricky.

  “Concubine.”

  “What?”

  “Japs have geishas. We have concubines. You questioning my sexual orientation, you androgynous piece of shit? Gimme those eggs.”

  The Taes were getting ready to close up for a few weeks. They were going to Hong Kong to visit the new in-laws and I wanted to say, “Don’t go”. I told Ricky some of what Sverdloff told me. He was skeptical. I think Ricky was a little jealous of Tolya.

  “You’re telling me this nuke food is coming into Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten?” Ricky sniffed some olive oil and grimaced. “This is no virgin.” He tossed the bottle in the garbage and opened a fresh one. “You considering doing something stupid, Artie?”

  “I don’t know, Rick. What am I thinking?” I reached over to the stereo and put Stan Getz on.

  “Don’t do it. Or let me come with you. I may be beautiful, but I’m tough.” He tossed his cigarette in the sink so it hissed and went out.

  He was tough. His uncles taught him martial arts stuff when he was a little kid and he could fly across the room and kick you in the kishkas so you wanted to die. I once saw him in action when some bastard came on to Dawn and he went ballistic.

  “I’m taking some vacation,” I lied. “Go to Hong Kong with the family, Rick. Eat good.”

  Ricky wrote a number on a pad. “Leave me a message there if anything goes wrong.” It was a local number.

  “Where’s there?”

  “What’s the difference?” He looked out the window.

  “Dorothy know where you’re going?”

  “I met someone, OK? Maybe it’s better Pop doesn’t know. OK?”

  “OK.”

  He poured olive oil in a pan and fried the eggs and put them on a plate. “Eat,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “He’s a swimmer. A pro.” Ricky gave me a sly, pleased look.

  “So,” I said, aiming for cool. “He’s here for some Gay Games thing.”

  Ricky laughed it off. “You think I plan to spend my vacation watching a bunch of fags playing volleyball? I only want to fuck the guy, Artie,” he said and for the first time I saw him as a grown-up, his own man. Ricky out of the closet was Ricky unleashed.

  “What’s his name?”

  Ricky changed the subject. “I talked to my cousin.”

  “What?”

  “I told you something bothered me about Sverdloff from the beginning. I talked to my cousin Don in Shanghai.”

  “You have a cousin in Shanghai named Don?”

  “Yeah, Don Ho II. It’s his stage name. He has six nightclubs. Hawaiian themes. Listen, he remembers Sverdloff. They were chummy on the commie rock circuit years ago. Sverdloff used to broadcast out of Russia to Shanghai. Before Tianenmen Square, when rock was hot and good. He could speak Chinese, all kinds of dialects, and he could put one over on the official antbrains in both countries because the Russians spoke lousy Chinese, and we didn’t know nada about music. He was, you should forgive the expression, an artist. Guess what his call sign was.”

  “Tell me his call sign,” I said to humor Ricky while I ate the eggs and because Stan Getz cheered me up.

  “Red Mercury,” Rick said triumphantly. “And you didn’t even have to open your fortune cookie.”

  “You really believe in this dreck? This red mercury?”

  “It’s real, babe. Red mercury is the stuff the Sovs put in their nuclear weapons to make them smaller and hotter. Real rare. Lethal. Elusive.”

  “You know why all those Cold War thrillers worked so good? Because you can’t make up crap that’s weirder than Russians believe.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “I did physics, remember? It’s real. Artie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If your Polack killed Ustinov by mistake, who was he after?”

  Things weren’t bad enough, I called the doc, who said the test wasn’t back. Monday, he promised. Lily Hanes had also stopped taking my calls. I went looking for her at her building on 10th Street and the doorman, José, said she was out. But he remembered me from the other night, and that and fifty bucks persuaded him to let on as to how he figured Lily had gone to her gym, a few blocks east; he had seen her with her gym bag.

  In a room where the walls were covered with mirrors, a couple dozen white women in skintight gear punched the air in time to a litany of requirements; the guy giving the orders didn’t have a whole lot more muscles than me and I wondered what he had. Lily saw me and broke ranks and ran across the floor.

  “I didn’t figure you for a health nut,” I said. Her red hair was tied back with a yellow scarf and her high forehead was dripping sweat. Unlike the other women, she wore baggy shorts and no make-up. There were violet circles under her eyes and she looked her
age. I liked her better this way: she seemed vulnerable.

  She backed me into the corner where a plastic pitcher of green juice sat on a table.

  “It was a mistake,” Lily said wearily. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come on to you for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing,” I said, getting in between her and the room, the class, the mirrors, the trainer. I cut off her view of them, then I glanced over my shoulder.

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “That is Kickbox.”

  “That’s his name?”

  “No, his name is Jamie. He teaches kick-boxing. It’s all the rage,” she said, but at this, at least, she grinned. “I hate exercise. Someone at the office gave me a course, a sort of gift. A booby prize for Teddy’s wrath. He wants to fire me because of all the attention. It’s not a good time for me. I’m trying to quit the smokes without turning into a tower of blubber.”

  I knew I had to tell her about the blood, but I was chicken and instead I said, “Be with me.”

  “It was a night. Period. One night. I don’t know what you are and I don’t want to know. All I know about cops is Mel Gibson and Morse, and I’ve had it with politics. I just want to get away from the whole bloody nightmare,” she said. “I asked around about the missing pages from Ustinov’s book. I asked Phil.”

  “I’m not Mel Gibson and you don’t have to pay me off, you know.”

  “I think the pages are in Phil’s safety deposit box in the bank. I don’t know what he edited out, but there was something. I’m going away for a while.”

  “Where to?”

  “Away. Away. OK?”

  “Anyone bother you again?” I said.

  “I’m not sure. Some more phone calls. A car I keep seeing outside my house. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll take you away. Come away with me.”

  “It’s you I want to get away from.” She brushed the sweat out of her eyes.

  In the background, Mr Kickbox watched himself in the mirrors.