Seeing him like that, I knew instinctively he had told Tolya the truth. He had the goods. Somewhere, he had this stuff, this red mercury, and I had to get it. But he wouldn’t deal directly with me—the Jew cop. And Tolya had gone to ground. Sverdloff had lied to me. Don’t trust Tolya Sverdloff, Gavin Crowe had said in the Chelsea Hotel. Don’t trust him.
The subway grunted and stopped and I got out feeling wired. Like worms were under my skin. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be sick. I got out of the station and walked over to the pier. I tried to pretend there might be God looking after Artie Cohen and I could promise him good behavior in return for good news.
Maxine was standing at the edge of the rink watching her kids stumble around on rollerblades. She had on shorts and a grubby blue shirt. She didn’t look so great, her face was pinched and nervous and she sucked on a Snapple bottle like it was a pacifier. She didn’t kiss me. She just looked at me and said, “You have to stop, Artie. You hear me? You have to stop this crap.”
“I don’t need this,” I said quietly.
She was distracted. Something was worrying her. She walked in little circles at the edge of the rink while in the background people slid on rollerblades, fell, laughed, shouted. Maxie looked around. Something was wrong and she wasn’t going to tell me. I thought it was the test. I thought she had the results and she didn’t want to tell me or touch me.
“Did you get it? Tell me.” I grabbed her wrist and she wrestled free from me.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I got it.”
So that was it. I shivered and turned in the other direction so she couldn’t see me. I thought I might puke.
“You don’t have AIDS, Artie. The test was negative,” she said.
I could have cried with relief. I put my arms around her and tried to kiss her cheek but she didn’t want any. She pulled away again.
“Hey, be happy for me. OK?”
“Sure, Artie.” She seemed distracted. I followed her glance, but Maxie was only looking at one of those he-shes that live under the West Side Highway. This guy was in bike shorts with a codpiece, his beautiful face made up like a woman, gold curls cascading down his back. He braked his skates, then, with elegant gestures, took a container of yogurt out of his bag and started eating from it.
“Wow,” I said. “Look at that.” I was trying to get Maxie to talk to me, to lighten up, but she was on the edge of panic.
“The kids look good,” I said, watching the twins, who were a few yards away giggling helplessly as they fell on top of each other. Sometimes I wish I was seven. “You want to tell me what this is about if it’s not about the test?”
“It’s about your running wild all over the city and I’m getting the raw end,” she said, and it kind of pissed me off. “People know we’re friends. They know I help you out.”
“I lied for you a few times, Maxie. You remember? You remember that time you fucked up and I covered for you?”
“You can be a real prick when you try, Artie. I was pregnant. I was out of it. So I fucked up. OK, I owe you. But you ask too much, Artie, You really do. You think you can do your charm bullshit and I’ll tell you anything you want, you know? Look, I’m gonna tell you a couple things, OK, and then I want you to stop. I want you to leave me alone and let the pros find out who murdered Ustinov and the girl on the beach. They got a gun, you know. A match for the weapon that killed Ustinov.”
“I heard.” I thought of Sonny at the game at the Garden. So he was telling the truth. “What else?”
She shrugged. I didn’t think she knew about Lev. How much did she know? She looked out at the rink again, at the blur of bodies, and for a minute I felt angry at all the careless people having mindless fun.
“Maxie? Hey. I’m sorry. I’m grateful you got the test results. I was scared shitless, OK. So that’s it, I’ll leave you alone.”
“Fine,” she said.
“What couple things?”
“What?”
“You said you were gonna tell me a couple things.”
“You know the knife that guy cut you with, you remember?”
I touched my face. “Here. He cut me here. Hurt like fuck.”
“You already got my sympathy, babe, alright?” she said. “The knife was hot.”
“Hot?”
“Radioactive. Hot.”
“How do you know?”
“Roy Pettus asked me to check it out. With a Geiger counter, you know? We checked it out. It registered. It was hot.”
“I see.”
“Does it make sense to you? Does it?” She didn’t know about Lev or the suitcases.
“Maybe. Do you want me to tell you about it?”
“No. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to owe you. I don’t want to know what I don’t need to know. I’m not like you. You should get a family, Artie. Get real.”
“How come you’re so pissed off?” I asked because Maxine was normally a real mild-mannered girl, a friend, and suddenly she was edgy, angry, like she was ashamed of something and wanted to cover up. One of her kids—Annie—raced over to her and asked for money for Cokes.
“Hi, Artie,” the girl smiled.
“Mr Cohen to you,” said Maxine, and gave her daughter some change.
“What was the other thing you were going to tell me?”
“The jar. With the girl’s fingers. The jar was also hot. Like the knife.” She glanced behind her.
“You waiting for someone, Max?”
She looked over her shoulder again, but there was only a young couple, the husband on rollerblades with a baby in a backpack. “No. The jar Roy Pettus sent me. With the girl’s fingertips. It registered too,” she said again. “I would never think of it, but Roy, you know he has this obsession.”
“Max, do you know anything about radiation?”
“No. Once in a while we get a call, from the nuclear medicine people over at the hospital, usually when the monitor goes off by mistake. We get a call to check stuff out, but it’s always laundry, rubber gloves, that kind of low-level shit. The real stuff they got specialists for. Radiologicals are not exactly a high priority in Brooklyn, you know.”
“Can you test a corpse for radioactivity?” I was thinking of Olga.
“From what I know, probably. I’m not sure.”
She looked at her watch, waved at her kids. They skated towards her, then draped themselves over Maxie and begged for another half hour. She told them to get their skates off.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I got to get home.”
“Let me get the girls some pizza or something.”
She was twitching like some kind of puppet and I wanted know who was pulling her strings or if I maybe just had bad breath, figuratively speaking.
“Art,” a voice said from behind me. It was Sonny Lippert. He was not wearing blades.
“Shit, Maxine. You set me up. You told him I was coming.”
Her face was hot and red. “I had to, Artie,” Maxine said. “I had to. I couldn’t keep lying for you. You’re going to get yourself hurt.” She looked miserable.
“You can go now,” Sonny said dismissively to Maxine. “I’ll take over here,” he said, as she touched my shoulder and hurried away to get her kids.
“Oh yeah, and thanks, sweetheart,” Sonny called out, but Maxine was out of earshot.
“You don’t listen, do you? I got to schlep over to this fucking pier to tell you you have got to stop this shit,” Sonny said when we were at the concession stand drinking coffee.
“I don’t know what you mean, Sonny.”
“I hear stories, you turn up in Brighton Beach, you’re hanging with the Zeitsev crowd—you working for them now, Artie? You still a Russian deep down? Did they get to you? They will, you know. Or they’ll get to someone you care about, if there is anyone, know what I mean, babe? Go away. Go to the island. Go stay with Danny. Or—” He let the sentence dribble away into his coffee cup.
“Yes? Or?”
“
Tell me what you know.”
“Why the fuck should I?”
“I’ll shut you down.”
“Ask Roy Pettus.”
“Sure, and maybe I should also call Saddam Hussein for information.”
“Tell me what you know, I’ll tell you what I’ve got,” I said.
Sonny looked at me and gave his version of a smile. “That won’t work. That won’t work at all. We got plenty. We got what we need. I got good men in Brooklyn. I’ll get the bastard with or without you, and I’ll get whoever set him up.”
What he was really scared of was I’d break the case and get the credit. That’s what he couldn’t stand. But Sonny shook me up; he could come down hard on me. Where was Tolya? Where was he?
“Can I go now?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Where?”
“I’m going on vacation, like you said to.”
“I’ll check,” he said. “And Artie –”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful who you screw with. It could make you sick.”
I got a cab home in time to see Ricky pull away from the curb, his parents in the car, luggage loaded up, and I stood on the pavement and waved them goodbye feeling pretty alone. I was alone in the whole building, it felt like. Everywhere I could hear noises. I looked across the street at the window where the creep watched me, or maybe he had made it up. For the time being I wasn’t going to die from AIDS. Sonny knew that much, that’s what he meant when he said be careful who you screw.
I took a bunch of beer and went up on the roof and thought about what Ricky said before he left. We were talking about nuke shit and this red mercury stuff, and he said “If I was you, I’d ask a Russian.”
6
On the door of the fake Tudor house in a prim suburban grid the name-plate read: ANDY FEDER. I figured maybe I made a mistake. But the taxi was already gone.
My goddamn car was in the shop again. It served me right for driving an antique. I had loved that Mustang once. Never own anything that eats while you sleep, Ricky said; the car ate my money. I wanted a big red Caddie, brand new leather seats.
I looked at the house. The rush of stuff was getting to me. There was too much, too many threads, Ustinov, Lev, Zeitsev. Now I was on Long Island. Like some bum digging in a garbage can, I was hoping for scraps. He was out there, but where?
“Artyom? It’s you?”
The screen door flew open as if I had been expected, as if someone was watching for me.
Is it really you, Artyom?”
“You’re Feder now?”
All that was left of the skinny nerd I knew in school was the wet brown dog eyes. Andrei Melorovich Federov. He wore baggy shorts, the pockets stuffed with mysterious items. “Can’t you be more like Andrei?” my father would say when my teachers told him I was smuggling rock and roll records into school. That was when Pop still expected things to work out, poor bastard.
“I am Andy Melvin Feder now. Sometimes Mel. You always had the American name of Art. Me, I have become Andy Feder. Sounds Jewish, yes? Better to sound Jewish in the community, scientifically speaking.” He peered at the driveway. “You have no car?”
“In the shop. I took the train.”
We pounded each other on the back a lot, like men think they have to, but what the hell, I really was glad to see him. We had met a few times when he first got to America, I didn’t feel comfortable with it, he went out west. I let it drop. Which is why I didn’t call ahead. I figured maybe he wouldn’t see me.
I followed him into the house. Both his parents were dead, Federov said; I only remembered the father, a pint-sized Stalinist whose own father had fought the revolution and named his only son Melor. Marx Engels Lenin Organization Revolution. In my generation, people named their kids Gagarin and Fidel; I didn’t know what they called them now, Tiffany probably, and I didn’t care. But Ricky said ask a Russian. Here was one authentic Russian physicist on Long Island, USA.
“I was sad when you did not come to my wedding or reply to my calls,” he said, and I knew I would have to atone with Moscow guy talk about American cars and Russian soul things. He took me into a suburban kitchen jammed with appliances.
“Look. Electric bagel slicer” Federov poured coffee into mugs and pulled open the refrigerator. “You would like?”
“I ate already.”
“It must be fifteen years. I have not seen you since I first arrived in America,” he said mournfully.
“These are all yours, Andrei?” A snapshot of five kids was on the refrigerator.
“All mine. Yeah. Big blonde one is wife, ha ha,” he added.
“Russian?”
“Yes, naturally. But high class. How about cake?” He sat at the table and I sat opposite him. He reached for the refrigerator again and pulled out a coffee cake.
“Talk to me first,” I said. “Tell me about nukes.”
“Nukes?” Feder guffawed. “What kind nukes?”
“You tell me. Twenty-five thousand warheads in every former Soviet craphole from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Kim Il Sung, Jr. Fallout. Draw me a picture.”
Contemplatively, he drank the coffee and ate some pastel-colored mints out of a cut-glass bowl. “Give me something to work with, otherwise this is a lecture in Physics 101, you want this?”
“No.”
“So Andy guesses maybe you are interested in spill of radioactive materials—radiologicals, nuke food, what you like to call it—from former Soviet Union, right? Who are bankers? Who are sample men? Mules? Scrap merchants.”
“Scrap merchants?”
“Poor slobs who collect insignificant amounts to sell. Low level. So you are perhaps interested in meaning of the sudden appearance on the world market of plutonium. Enriched uranium. Men with samples for sale?”
“How do you know?”
“Information is always available. Sometimes, the more information the less knowledge. You think because I’m Russian, I’m stupid? This is always your problem, Artyom.” He had become hostile; he knew me from way back.
Feder said, “The FBI opens an office in Moscow. Where? Smack in the middle of the embassy compound. Nice assignment for suicidal guy from Indiana. Everyone knows about the trade in radiologicals. Stuff leaking out of secret Sov cities. Arzamas, Tomsk. Turns up in Europe. Sell it to terrorists. Iran, maybe. Maybe Libya. Maybe you found this stuff in Brighton Beach?” For the first time he was interested.
“Maybe.”
“Please. Please!” He opened a drawer, grabbed a knife, slammed it shut. He began slicing a piece off the cake that stood on the table. “Why else would you be at my house after fifteen years, asking about radiologicals? You hated science at school. All you cared for was jazz music. Rock and roll. If you find any of this stuff in New York, this is big deal.”
Andrei spoke to me in a mixture of Russian and English. His English was slipshod, as if he couldn’t hang onto the present. Maybe the comic immigrant version he slipped into was cover. But what could he be covering for in this suburban paradise?
“Andrei, Andy, Melvin, whatever, talk to me.”
The veins on his nose popped, then he calmed himself. “We’ve known all this for years. Years. No one listens.”
“You want to show me your lab?”
“My day off,” he said cautiously.
“What’s your work?”
“Environmental stuff. Nuclear waste storage. Vitrification. You want to discuss fine points vitrification?” He was sarcastic.
“How long you been here now?”
“Ten years. Before that, Los Alamos. Then Brook-haven. Now here.”
“Really.”
“Why not? I’m a good guy. My daddy was a dissident,” he said, reinventing his past. “I am a US citizen. I was even a US soldier. Captain Feder. You are a citizen also?”
“Yup, Citizen Cohen. I’m a cop. Was a cop.”
“I guess us Sov boys like institutions, huh. What was it? They kicked you out? For women? You always got the girls,” he said, finish
ing his piece of cake.
“Retired. With honors,” I said. Federov was a manipulative prick, but I needed what was in his head, so I played it for old times’ sake while he choked on the cake.
“Tell me,” he said. “Who killed Gennadi Ustinov?”
“I don’t know.”
“But as soon as he dies radiological stuff turns up in the city?”
“Maybe he was selling it.”
Federov saw through me. He snorted contemptuously. “You know Ustinov was good guy, as far as it goes. Except being KGB, he was a piece of garbage.
“Come,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go out.”
We drove the short distance to the lab in Andrei’s Chevy Suburban. In a little park, we sat on a bench. I smoked. Down the hill, a yellow bus let workers out onto a green campus where some lab buildings stood. A boy in high-tops cut the lawn with a mower big as a tank; the grass smelled sweet.
Federov hunted his pockets and took out a few candy bars. He offered me a Baby Ruth. The Snickers he ate whole, like a snake devouring a rabbit. He was a lot more nervous than he said. Was Captain Feder still military? Obliged to report every encounter?
“OK, you get material for weapons in various ways. From spent fuel rods in nuclear power plants. From special places that make weapons-grade plutonium just for bombs. For years we thought you needed special weapons-grade stuff to make a bomb. Wrong. The British sold us Americans low-grade stuff, and we made a nice bomb with it anyway. Also, you don’t need much. Also, for terrorism, you don’t have to make a bomb at all. You have only to make terror. You want I draw you pictures?”
“Draw for me.”
Federov took me literally. He dragged some crumpled paper out of his pocket, took a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket and sketched for a minute while he talked.
“OK. Plutonium bomb, you need few pounds, but precision work. Uranium, you need maybe fifty-five pounds, but a crude bomb works OK. So. I make my bomb. I put her in a rental van. I drive it to the garage at World Trade Center, then run like hell. Boom. Explosion brings down one entire tower. It kills everyone inside. Also at least one hundred thousand extra from blast and radiation. Maybe more, depending on contamination, meteorological conditions, air vents, run-off systems. Manhattan is drenched with fallout.”
Red Mercury Blues Page 13
