Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “You videoed this?”

  “Sure, always. Help with burglaries. My kid sets it up, why not. I got a check cashing service. Guy forges social security cards, a video gimme some back-up.”

  He ran the tape: it was Lev.

  “You bought the stuff?”

  “Yeah, sure. I agreed to buy.” Farone laughed. “Sure. Sure. Sure. I did a deal with some Russkis to buy this stuff. I’m a broker, you know. I got deals with people. I’m the middle man. I don’t even know what it is. I ask around. Somewhere I heard Saddam bought some, a million bucks for a couple pounds of the stuff. I ask some more. I hear there’s guys in the midwest looking at polymers and lubricants and aerospace technology who want it real bad. They want a sample. Me, I never heard of it. Guy offers me this red mercury stuff on spec, I ask around. I say, why not?”

  “You ever see the stuff?”

  “Nah. That’s not my deal.”

  “Really, I heard you got a sample,” I said. “Should I get a warrant?”

  “You a cop?”

  I nodded.

  “Hey, I’m a cooperative guy, everyone knows Johnny Farone is friends with the police here.”

  “Where’s the sample?”

  “There ain’t no sample, honest to God,” he said and crossed himself. “You wanna search, go ahead, please be my guest.”

  I read the piece of greasy paper over and over. Red mercury.

  “Give me that videotape,” I said.

  He said “Sure” and stuck it in a brown envelope and gave it to me. From the mess on his desk he extracted more paper.

  “Look, man, what I want a sample for? You can see the thing right here. Here.” He handed over the paper, this one tidy and in English. It was a purchase order fom a company in Los Angeles.

  “What I want with samples when we already done the deal same day I get the offer, for eighty pounds of the stuff,” Farone said. Even lowlife tell the truth once in a while and Johnny Farone was telling me at least what he knew.

  A few minutes after I left, there was an explosion in an empty lot a few yards from Farone’s shop; it blew his windows out into the street and burned a top-floor apartment; no one was home though. That night, at the Coney Island end of Brighton Beach, another fire took the roof off a house; a family of seven was incinerated. The cops attributed this to a faulty space heater. The only reporter who noticed the small squad of discreet decontamination experts out in the middle of the night worked for a Russian language paper, and who the hell cared about that? I never found out if it meant anything. But as Lily Hanes said, sometimes things just happen. She was right. It was more than two weeks since Gennadi died and I still didn’t know why.

  10

  After I left Farone, over the weekend, alone in the loft, I checked all my contacts, my notes, my dossiers one at a time. The Jewish New Year was starting the beginning of the week, the city shutting down. I retraced my steps. I crossed the city, went back to Brooklyn. No Tolya. No nothing. Roy Pettus, who was in a lousy mood and didn’t take my call at first, said he was coming up empty, too, but I couldn’t tell how much he was telling me. I tried Maxine, but her husband said she was at her mother’s with the kids and I knew he was lying. I hadn’t felt this lousy since the year before we left Moscow. There was this thing in the pit of my stomach and I couldn’t digest it.

  I was going round in circles that ended back in Brighton Beach. I couldn’t keep away. I was looking for the creep, for Tolya, for what? I didn’t know what.

  I hit the bars first, then the cafés and clubs. At the Batumi, I recognized a few faces in the crowd and one of the waiters greeted me by name. Someone offered me a drink; a girl asked me to dance with her. As if I now belonged, they talked to me in Russian; I had become one of them.

  At the Rasputin, a fancy new joint that looked over the boardwalk, the women ate French food with their minks on. I ran into Elem Zeitsev there, or maybe he ran into me. He introduced me to a couple of lawyers from Wall Street he was entertaining, and then he took me into a private room. He didn’t say he knew what I had been doing; maybe he didn’t know. Sipping a Martini straight up with a twist, he asked pleasantly if we could do some business now.

  “Have you got what I’m interested in? What we talked about at your uncle’s house? Can I count on you now?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I think we do,” and I never knew if he was bluffing, if he could really put his hands on some plutonium, some red mercury. “Does that mean you’re in, Artie—can I call you Artie? Does that mean you want to join us?”

  “Sure,” I said, and let him buy me some drinks and introduce me to his wife’s cousin, Marina, the blonde. Marina was friendly. She danced with me. We drank together. She told me she liked Billy Joel and sang to me.

  Later, I got smashed on the Absolut. I scared the shit out of myself. I was one of them, now. When I stumbled out the door late that night, Zeitsev called out, “Happy New Year, Artie Cohen.”

  If I was “in” with these hoods, how would I climb out? Who would help me? Who could I trust?

  11

  “Me you can trust.”

  In Dan Guilfoyle’s back yard in Sag Harbor, the whoosh of cars from the road was muted; the fog licked the motor boat Dan kept at the little landing dock at the edge of his property. He put his paw on my arm. “I’m sorry I was out of action, Art, darling. Fish were running good.”

  Dan was pushing seventy and retired, but he was in great shape. Around him and Dinah, I could let go, maybe even catch a night’s sleep. After a couple nights drinking in Brighton Beach, I had to get out of town or crack up. And maybe Danny could help.

  “Sonny Lippert called looking for you. I said you were shacked up with the brunette in Amagansett.”

  “Thanks, Danny.”

  He had been my first boss, he was a brilliant detective, street smart, institutional smart, incorruptible. We sat in his yard. Dan poured cold white wine from one of the North Fork vineyards he owned a piece of.

  “I been thinking about you.” Dan shifted his weight.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, Ustinov gets bumped off, I think of you. You want to take me through it? Don’t give me the political rap. Talk homicide to me, OK? From the beginning. How did you hear about Ustinov’s murder, for instance?”

  For an hour or two, maybe longer, I sat in his yard in Sag Harbor and told him everything, the whole mess of a story of the night Gennadi was shot on TV and everything that happened since. He listened quietly and sipped the wine.

  “I’m not going back to Moscow, Danny. I’m not, you know. I don’t care what.”

  “Calm down, kiddo.” Dan got up and stretched. “You say it’s an accident, the logic says it was a hit, the evidence says nada. Zilch. I got to tell you, I’m not sure I buy this nuke business.

  “Let’s work backwards. If the shooter was aiming at someone else, who was it? Who? Who except Ustinov? Zalenko? I seen him on TV, with Rush, I think. This fellow is crazy. I’m a crazy old guy, but this guy is crazy crazy. Could it be Zalenko? The stripper? They did her in the end, maybe they went for her on the show? But why do it in public, like that? Excuse me, Artie, I gotta go take a piss. Age,” he grumbled.

  Through the window of the old house I could see Dinah, Dan’s wife. In her sixties, she was still stunning: coffee-colored skin, black hair just turning to steel. She had been a nightclub singer once. She came out, set a platter of barbecued shrimp on the table, and said to Dan, “See this boy gets some rest,” then got in her silver Mercedes and went off to visit her sister in Nineveh Beach.

  “How do you know about the nuke stuff?” Dan said, coming back out.

  “I got to be friendly with this agent. Roy Pettus? You hear of him?”

  “You got a lot of friends, Artie,” he smiled, but he added, “Love ’em and leave ’em.”

  “You mean I’m a whore.”

  “Come off it.”

  “You taught me right, Dan. You always said in New York City it’s who you know.”r />
  “Lemme talk to some pals at immigration. The system there’s shot to hell, but I still got a few Unes out. Lemme turn this thing over in my head,” Dan said. “You want to stretch your legs before we turn in?”

  We walked into the town and down Main Street towards the marina. Dan loved this place where his father was born. Grandfather, too. When he retired, after a stint at customs and immigration, he came back and took possession of the place. We passed the Paradise Grill where Dan generally ate breakfast with some other guys, and I remembered once how his oldest son would hover, unsure if he had a right to join these leathery old men, most ex-cops.

  “Sit down, lad, right there where your father sat when he was a bridegroom and his father before him,” he had told Danny Jr once; it made me jealous, this belonging.

  It was fall and night came on faster, but it was still mild and a fog was blowing in, running across the yellow moon that was reflected in water thick and still as wet silk. In New York, I was home. Always had been. Knew it like a village. Out here, over the bridge, in America, I was still only a visitor. Dan belonged. I didn’t want him to see how lonely I suddenly felt. I made dumb guy talk instead and bought an ice cream cone.

  “I love when the girls are still out without coats on,” I said idiotically.

  Danny wasn’t fooled. “You don’t have to charm me, Artie.”

  The big boats were alight. There was a faint sound of music and muffled laughter and ice on glass from the big sleek yacht at the end of the marina. Kids eating waffle cones on the dock stopped to gape at it. On deck a blonde in a sarong gazed down and waved; her fingernails were gold in the night lights.

  I wanted to board the big boat and sail away.

  “Whose boat?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  Back at his place, Dan went to bed and I sat out in the garden and read a Tony Hillerman novel. It was terrific stuff—Indians, dead men’s teeth, the high desert, ritual healers—not exactly familiar territory for a fat-ass city Jew boy like me, except in the way the clans were connected. Maybe I’d go join a tribe. The Navajo might have me. They didn’t like death either. Dances with Cohen, I thought. Dances with Nukes.

  I ate some of the shrimp, finished the wine and watched the moon trail through the trees into view. Night birds perched in a dead tree in the next yard and tittered. Crickets screamed. The fog rolled up to the edge of my feet. I felt someone watching me from the water, or maybe I dozed off and dreamed it. I woke up an hour later, still thinking of the big boat in the marina; I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  In the morning, while Dinah slept, Dan and I drove up to the beach for a swim in his baby-blue Corvette. It was Dan got me into the vintage car business.

  “You’re too old for this piece of garbage,” I said.

  “Screw you,” Dan said affectionately, then pulled into the Candy Kitchen for breakfast. Dan hailed a few friends.

  Farmers sat at the counter stirring half and half into their coffee, eating fried eggs. Summer was over, but there were still agents who talked deals and local studs who ate pancakes and talked conquests.

  A pair of women with cruel faces and handsome bodies arrived wearing Spandex bike shorts; their kids were as silky as the women were hard, made of the stuff that good American money could pull from the gene pool in one generation. The little girls wore jodhpurs, sipping milk with the world-weary panache of Bette Davis consuming gin. Behind the counter, fresh-faced girls with big cheeks served up breakfast, wondering if they would ever make it off Long Island. Class in America, I thought. Great tits, though.

  As I turned to look, I saw the old man at a table in the back. He was flipping packets of sugar off the back of his coffee spoon, trying to amuse a little boy beside him. He was tan as fine leather and he wore a black linen shirt, white shorts, loafers, no socks and a gold watch on a worn leather strap. His head was bent toward the child; the carefully barbered hair was white.

  The little boy was beautiful and alert, and he smiled as the packets flipped off the spoon onto the table like tiddly-winks. The man cut up his egg in small squares and tried to cajole the little boy, then ate it himself. I craned my neck for another glimpse. I don’t know if he saw me; he was fierce in his attention to the child. “Eat, honey,” he seemed to say to the boy. “See how good it is,” he added, infinitely patient, putting the egg into his own mouth.

  I realized why the big boat had interested me; it was his boat. His boat.

  “What’s the matter?” It was Dan who was still eating his eggs, but I had already taken the check and was halfway out of the booth, a twenty in my hand.

  “Let’s go.”

  As fast as I could, I got out onto the sidewalk and waited for Dan who appeared with a bag of muffins for Dinah.

  “Who was he?” Dan said.

  “Chaim Brodsky,” I said.

  Dan was interested. “You know Chaim Brodsky?”

  12

  Chaim Brodsky lived quietly in a grove of butterfly trees near Georgica Pond in East Hampton. The lawn rolled away from his house like a carpet up to the edge of the dunes.

  The main house with its porches and porticoes had been built in the nineteenth century by Minard Lafaver. The pool house, where we met, was modern. On the wall was a Matisse, a huge amazing thing you could see from outside or in, the colors glittering and wild in the daytime, subdued and mysterious at night. Everywhere you could hear the ocean rustle against the beach.

  Sooner or later, I would have ended up at Brodsky’s. I knew I’d have to go the minute I saw him at breakfast. A note was hand delivered to Danny’s. Would I come for a swim?

  Had he seen me? Was it a coincidence? It didn’t matter. He would know I was around and no one refused his invitations. I don’t know why I was reluctant; maybe because he was part of my past.

  With me and Brodsky, there is some blood, in a way. My grandmother’s younger sister, on my mother’s side, had gone to America with her first husband and later married Brodsky. She died a few years after, there were no kids and Brodsky remarried, but the rare occasions we met, he never let me forget we were family.

  “Swim with me, Artyom,” Brodsky said when I arrived and we had kissed and I changed. “Swim with me.” He removed his robe. It had his monogram embroidered on it: CB. CB were Brodsky’s initials. CBM was Brodsky’s media group. It had taken me all this time to get it: CB were the initials in Ustinov’s diary the day he died.

  Chaim Brodsky was seventy-five but he was a rangy powerful man who swam with obsessive regularity in ice-cold water during the summer when it was hot. All afternoon he swam laps. He gestured at the pool and I climbed in after him.

  He flicked a button on the blue Fabergé pool clock that measured laps, and began swimming. The numbers on the clock were made of tiny jeweled goldfish, the thing having been made for, but never used by, one of the daughters of the last Czar when swimming was all the rage in Edwardian Petersburg.

  Chaim Brodsky swam silently. I swam beside him. He glanced at me, his eyes, through the goggles, as pale and cold as Gennadi’s; in this way, they looked alike. After a few laps, he stopped at the shallow end, stood and talked.

  “How is your aunt?” he said as if we had just met up at a tea party after a brief absence. He meant Birdie.

  “Birdie is fine,” I said.

  “And your mother?”

  “In her own world.”

  “Yes, I heard. I’m sorry. She was a beautiful woman, your mother.” Something in his voice unnerved me: he said it like a man who had seen my mother naked.

  “I knew everyone in Moscow at one time. I knew all the foreigners, of course. I brought books. Films. Do you remember?”

  I remembered. “I was only a kid.”

  The sun shone. There was no sound except the water and the rustle of the butterfly trees and the faintest tumble of a mild surf beyond the green silk grass and pale dunes.

  “I hate to leave this, even for a day,” Brodsky sa
id mournfully.

  “Leave?”

  “Moscow. I have to go to Moscow next week.”

  He sighed and we swam again. He had been doing business with the Russians since Stalin died. His father had been one of the few successful Jews in Kazakhstan, way back just after the revolution, and when they came to America, they traveled first class from Odessa.

  Brodsky had been born and grew up a rich boy on Riverside Drive. After Harvard he took over his father’s business. He had exclusive deals all over the Soviet Union; he knew everyone who mattered on both sides: Brezhnev, Gromyko, Andropov, later Gorby. He knew Harriman, and Armand Hammer was his best friend. I remembered pictures of Brodsky at Nixon’s funeral. With Nixon gone, Brodsky owned the Russian franchise, although he was modest about it, refusing most offers from presidents of corporations and presidents of countries.

  Brodsky was the only man in America who really knew how things worked in Russia: the relationships between the old nomenklatura and the new politicians, the Moscow mafias and ethnic clans, the atomic gangsters and capitalists, the KGB and CIA. He knew about the Swiss bank accounts, gold deposits, oil. He was intimate with the peculiar network of foreign money in Moscow that had always been secretly powerful and intellectually influential. He knew about wheat and beef and diamonds, and he kept dachas in Nikolina Gora near Moscow and on the Black Sea, or so it was said; when I was a kid, there were always rumors about Chaim Arnoldovich Brodsky.

  For a while, he had an apartment on the banks of the Moskva facing Gorky Park; Birdie had taken me there once when I was a child, to shake his hand and see his Chagalls. Brodsky had been the handsomest man I had ever seen; his dark blue cashmere overcoat was tossed casually over a chair and I had nuzzled it—I was maybe nine or ten—and I had never felt anything so soft. I imagined Brodsky and Birdie had been lovers once, a million years before, but maybe it was only a boy’s fantasy.