Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “You don’t get it, do you? You’re in the middle of this. I’m no wuss, but the creep knows where I live and I don’t want to wake up like that girl on Brighton Beach with my fingers in a jar.” She held out her hands in a gesture of despair and sat down hard on a chair. I crouched beside her and she put her hand on my arm as if to steady herself. “I’m scared, Artie. People think there’s always solutions to a puzzle, like a book. If you connect the dots, you get a picture. But things just happen. Sometimes it just goes on and on and people keep dying and there’s no reason.”

  Lily Hanes was real smart; it was the thing I liked most about her, along with her noisy good humor, and her curiosity, the self-possession, the lack of guile. OK, and the legs.

  “You said it was a great story. I could help you get it.” I was begging.

  “Don’t con me. Last time I got obsessed with a story, I ended up in an East Berlin jail. It wasn’t great.”

  “Does Frye know about us?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  Is this about Frye? You’re going away with him?”

  “Not exactly,” she said and pulled herself off the chair and looked at the moving figures in front of the mirrors.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “He’s married, isn’t he?”

  “You checked?”

  “I asked around. What do you see in him?”

  “He used to make me laugh. He introduced me. He knows everyone. He reads everything. Like this Australian friend of mine said once, I thought he could be my Wonderbra; I thought he’d make me bigger. It didn’t work out.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “Yeah, he scares me a little.”

  “How?”

  “He’s a manipulator. Every time I get free, he finds a reason to need me. Look, I gotta go. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

  I could smell the sweat and the perfume. I grabbed her hand. “Lily? How come a woman as great as you isn’t married?”

  She laughed. “This is an old-fashioned question.” Lily kissed my cheek. “I don’t know, Artie. I really don’t. I’ll see you around.”

  I went home.

  On the sidewalk outside my building, Genia’s little girl was gazing at a doll with pink hair on a street stall. I spoke to her in Russian and she pushed a note in my hand. When I turned to buy her the doll, she ran away.

  Genia’s note invited me to Brighton Beach Sunday to drink tea and eat. The old man, her father, hated my guts, so I figured the invite was some kind of bait. I figured Pop had been gossiping on the boardwalk and I bet he put it around I could be bent cheap. I wondered who was interested.

  4

  “Mr Cohen, I am Elem Zeitsev,” a voice said in English.

  Outside my cousin’s house, leaning against a snappy black BMW convertible, was a slim, polished, good-looking man, forty maybe. He wore a blue denim work shirt from the Gap, faded jeans, loafers, no socks. He was extremely polite and the hand he offered in greeting was beautifully manicured.

  “Your cousin tells me you might be interested in working with our company,” he said. He was pretty bald about it.

  “You’re asking me to dance?” I said and he only smiled and held open the car door. I slid onto the buff leather seat, then he got in.

  “If you like dancing,” he said.

  Zeitsev drove us to the end of Brighton Beach Avenue, past the Menorah Home for old people; at the Holocaust Memorial Mall, he turned onto Emmons Avenue.

  Where Sheepshead Bay began, most of the signs were in Italian. Lundy’s, its frescoed walls restored as lovingly as some Florentine church, announced its reopening as the biggest restaurant on earth. In the canal opposite, fishing boats advertised half days of fluke fishing; the fluke were running, the signs said. Behind the suburban villas that faced the canals, in the gardens, satellite dishes sprouted like ears.

  Zeitsev pulled into the gravel drive of one of the houses and turned off the ignition. Three men in suits stood in the garden. “Some friends of ours,” he said and stayed in the car.

  “What work did you have in mind?”

  “We have an organization. A legitimate one. There are always corruptions. I guess you know about Agron and the tommy guns and Ivankov and all the nonsense you read.”

  I nodded. “I read.”

  He checked himself in the mirror. He had good hair. “Some of us have always understood American democracy. It is what we want. You know, my parents used to call me Jack, because they said I looked like JFK? You think so?”

  “Sure, Jack. You’ve got the hair,” I said.

  “Most of our people have never done anything for themselves. They are frightened. To get anything you had to make deals. To outsmart the police or the state was to be a good guy, a dissident. For most of these people the law is the oppressor. We try to help them. We provide services. Justice.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Unlike the hoods in silk suits at the Batumi and the sleaze at the Arena Café, Elem Zeitsev was not a crude man. Zeitsev had seen The Godfather.

  “There is anti-Semitism everywhere, even in America. We become successful, and because this is America, the authorities cannot persecute us for being Jews. So they say we are gangsters.” He laughed. “Do you think I look like a gangster?”

  “Depends who’s playing the part.”

  Zeitsev snapped open the glove compartment. “Swiss chocolates. Teuscher,” he said, putting a box on the seat beside him. He took some socks from the glove compartment and a tie from his pocket, and put them on. In the mirror, he adjusted the tie like a vain little boy on a visit to the relatives. He was pretty charming about it. “My uncle thinks nice boys wear a tie to show respect. I may be forty-six. I may have graduated from Columbia Law School. In this family, I am a boy.”

  “We can do some business if you want, Jack,” I said.

  But one of the suits had signaled Zeitsev and he was out of the car, silent, preparing himself for the encounter in some way I didn’t understand. The preparation, I realized later, wasn’t about respecting the uncle, but about replacing him.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “But first come and meet my family.”

  The formal living room was dark, paneled in oak, hung with mirrors in gilded frames. On the mantelpiece were family photographs framed in heavy silver.

  The old man sat in an armchair in front of the fire. Zeitsev, my Zeitsev, the younger, fussed with his tie and tripped on the oriental rugs that were piled ankle deep on the floor. The soft chatter of about a dozen people in the room ceased; they all turned to watch.

  Elem Zeitsev leaned over the old man and gave the uncle a kiss smack on the mouth the way you used to see Brezhnev kiss other old commies like Ceauşescu. Smack, right on the kisser. It was enough like a scene from a movie that I had to try not to laugh.

  Zeitsev stood up and held his hand out to a plain woman with dull hair who wore a doe-colored suede dress and pearls big as eggs. A canary diamond in her ring was turned in towards the palm, as if she despised the gift. Zeitsev pushed her in my direction and she pressed her thin lips together to squeeze out a smile.

  “Mr Cohen, this is my wife, Yekaterina Alexandrovna,” he said. “Speak English, Katya,” he said softly.

  She spoke halting English; I spoke some Russian back; we made dry conversation about the weather. She was a daughter of the nomenklatura; Zeitsev had probably married her for the connections. I wondered why she’d married this mob; maybe it was love.

  “My wife breeds dogs,” Zeitsev said, and she smiled a little and showed me a room with half a dozen little dogs, hairy things, lying on the floor like mops, whining. “She has her own kennels. Perhaps you’d like to visit,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Zeitsev worked the crowd. The other women, his cousins, were flashy women in alligator heels and big Bulgari jewellery with colored stones. I saw the blonde with the great posture I had seen at the Batumi.

  The old man, Pa
vel Zeitsev, was the star attraction. He gazed at a small television set on a table beside him and between his hands he held a ginger cat he seemed intent on strangling. The animal sprang out of his grasp, but the old man shuffled after it and brought it back with the weary resolve of a time-serving torturer.

  Zeitsev was the brains in Brighton Beach. He had been in the Gulags as a young man, they said, he had belonged to the Black Empire of Crime and had the tattoos to show for it. He was untouchable, so far as the law was concerned, he was a pillar of the community, he was a poet. He read poems over the radio; Russians were impressed.

  He delivered the usual litany: corruption in America; bent cops; the need for discipline. “We are not Western,” he said, taking a hockey puck off the side table and manipulating it like a rosary between his fingers. “We have tried your suits but they do not entirely fit. Another tape,” he ordered the younger Zeitsev, who changed the video tape and said to me, “My uncle owns several hockey players.”

  “Teams, you mean,” I said. There was no answer.

  He was silent for about ten minutes while I sat, then I asked about his poetry. With the sly wink of a pornographer, he beckoned me to an old-fashioned glass-fronted cabinet.

  Fondling his books, he showed me first editions of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. I had passed some kind of test.

  After that, the children were brought in and there was lunch in the dining room where I got to sit between the uncle and the blonde babe. I had never seen so much caviar in my life, or such big eggs, and after that and the borscht and the dumplings, a couple of babushkas hefted a side of beef onto the table. There was little talk. The more this crowd drank, the more silent it got. There were a few desultory toasts and the old man went back to his television. I got Elem Zeitsev to one side.

  “Can we talk? Jack?”

  “Of course.” He led me to the porch in back of the house.

  “Business, Jack,” I said casually, taking a cigarette out of a pack in my pocket. He lit it for me with a plastic lighter that cost a buck. Zeitsev knew his part did not include a wiseguy’s gold lighter.

  “My uncle likes you,” he said. “He says you are a cultured man. What kind of business shall we do?”

  “I’m thinking of getting interested in radiologicals,” I said. “Plutonium, uranium, red mercury. Industrial uses, of course.” I bluffed as best I could. “Experimental medicine. To help the sick.”

  He laughed. “We don’t touch the stuff,” he said easily.

  “I’m disappointed.”

  “We get cowboys now and then. Sample men. Scrap merchants usually. With certificates. Without. I feel for the bastards. There are first-class physicists who get fifty dollars a month. They have families to feed in Russia, but it’s not for us. It’s illegal. This is small stuff for small-time terrorists with popcorn money.” He was an engaging fellow.

  “Could it be more interesting if this was big stuff? Very big?”

  He nodded very slightly.

  “Any offers recently, Jack? I’d be very grateful for some help. A favor.” I figured I sounded like a two-bit actor playing a hard-boiled cop in a B picture. But it seemed to go down OK, at least Zeitsev was smiling.

  “I’ll let you know. I’m glad you have become part of the community,” he added, without any irony so far as I could tell.

  Elem Zeitsev offered me a ride home but I said I’d take the subway and he laughed. “A man of the people?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I like people.”

  “May I be in touch?” He was amiable and impassive.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m looking for something touching.”

  The back door of the house opened and the old man came out, one of the hairy dogs on a leash. A thin man in a suit helped him and when he turned around, I saw it was the bookkeeper with the glasses.

  I walked. I needed air. The surreal afternoon had made me forget the AIDS test for a while. And anyway, what could I do except wait?

  Elem Zeitsev knew about Lev, I figured. Tolya was right: he brought the samples to Zeitsev, things got hot, so to speak, Zeitsev cut him loose. Halfway to Brighton Beach, I called Genia; the little girl said she was getting her hair done and I found her at the Charming Lady Beauty Salon. For a while, I stood in the door. I could see Genia under a steel helmet and she was animated, in spite of her bruised face, by the company of other women gabbing in her own language. The lotions and shampoos gave off a rich, acrid smell that mixed with the excited voices.

  “Americans make shit,” one of them said. “Buy the Sony, I’m telling you.” Her friend replied in Russian with a grunt. Genia looked up and saw me.

  I sat in the chair next to her.

  “I met Zeitsev,” I said. “Both of them.”

  She hushed me. “I know. Of course, I know.”

  “You think I should do business with them?”

  Genia withdrew into her dryer; a Russian beauty magazine lay in her lap.

  “Tell me about the girl,” I said.

  “Mr Zeitsev offered to pay for her music lessons.”

  Genia and the women looked up as the door opened, the chimes jingling “Midnight in Moscow”. A uniformed cop removed his cap and tried smiling. No one smiled back. Around here all cops were bad news.

  “Tell me about the man you rented a room to. A Pole?”

  She shook her head.

  “Please.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “He beat you up.”

  “It’s a mistake,” she whispered. “I don’t remember.”

  “You want to come out for coffee? We’ll buy something for the child?” I said to Genia, but she shook her head.

  Outside, the street was jammed. I stopped into the Arbat Café and drank beer, watching two men in ponytails and Calvin T-shirts eat dinner with their women; the women laughed hysterically. The talk was all about money. I leaned against the building and breathed in the silky blue autumn air for a minute, trying to shed the sick feeling the place gave me, and the panic.

  I saw him.

  From the back, I recognized him, the tilt of the head, the shape of the jaw. I had seen him a dozen times on the video, I knew him from Tolya’s description, from the crummy snapshot I carried everywhere. I knew him. It was Lev.

  Almost casually, I had come looking for him, and he was here, maybe looking for me, meandering down Brighton Beach Avenue, caught in the drift of shoppers. For a moment he was trapped between two enormous old women who carried him along through the crowd between them, as if to his wedding.

  One more time, I had no weapon; Zeitsev would not have let me in his uncle’s house with one, but I started walking anyway. Then I ran.

  The shoppers screamed at me. An old lady straddling a camp stool fell over when I scrambled past. I ignored them all and followed him, up to the boardwalk, onto the beach. Sucking in air that came off the ocean, I ran after him, tripping over clotted piles of seaweed and beer cans and used needles. Here was where creeps shot up when they had no place left to go.

  He was breathing hard. I could hear him breathing as he slalomed between the struts that held up the boardwalk and on to Coney Island.

  Something glinted. There was a knife in his hand and he raised it and turned towards me, and in the bright autumn sunlight, for the first time, I saw him full face: Lev Ivanov, if that was his real name, had once been a good-looking man. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but his cheeks were sunken like an old man’s, and the pale Slavic skin was pitted with lesions and bruises. Lank yellow hair, what was left of it, fell over his forehead, and the eyes that almost glittered in the sunshine were empty of anything human.

  “I’ll buy your stuff. I want the samples,” I shouted at him in Russian. “I have money. I have it,” I said. “Lev,” I called him. “Lev Ivanov.”

  I thought I saw him hesitate, but maybe he didn’t hear me or wouldn’t trust me and he threw the knife at me in an arc and it glittered in the light that streamed through the ro
tting boards. I covered my face and ducked and when I looked up, Lev had disappeared into the dark recesses under the boardwalk.

  I ran. But it was pointless and I was winded. Maybe I should have chased him harder, but he was gone. I got the subway up to Park Slope where Tolya told me he was staying with a friend in the record business. At one of the tidy brownstones, I rang a bell and a man with corn rows and denim overalls came out on the stoop. I said I was looking for Sverdloff. He said he was a record producer, this was his house, the information I had was correct, except for one thing: he had not seen or heard from Tolya Sverdloff since his own last trip to Moscow ten years earlier.

  5

  There was nothing from Tolya when I called my machine. Sonofabitch. Nothing at all. Whose game was he playing?

  “Watch it,” I shouted at a kid on a skateboard who almost slammed into me as I stood on a corner using a payphone that had chewing-gum stuck in the receiver.

  “Fuck you,” the kid shouted. He was maybe ten years old.

  Tolya had disappeared. I figured the Taes had already gone to the airport, but I tried. Ricky answered. “We’re not leaving until later,” he said. “Ma took a message for you downstairs,” he said hesitantly.

  “Spit it out.”

  “Your friend Maxine called. She says she got some news from a doctor friend, that mean anything? She says if you want you can meet her.”

  “Where?”

  “That pier by the river, 23rd Street, they got a skating rink there. She has her kids. You want me to come, Artie?” But I had hung up and got on the subway.

  I tried feeling ironic, but I was busy making deals, like a kid does: if I’m OK, I’ll be good. But all I could think of was the creep. Lev’s face stayed in front of my eyes like sunspots. I couldn’t blink him away. The sickly Slav face in the light filtering down through the cracks in the boardwalk, the look of a diseased man who didn’t care, who would do something terrible if only to give the world the finger. The eyes, or what I had seen of them, were completely empty, like sockets in a skull.