Brodsky’s father made money in Russian oil; he made even more in minerals and, later, electronics and satellites. I don’t know how much he was worth: billions, though. Then he sold everything and retired to East Hampton.
“Swim,” Brodsky ordered gently as I lagged behind. I swam. I could hear a lawnmower in the distance, counterpoint to his soft voice. He still spoke the rich slightly patrician New York English of his boyhood; the voice was urbane but young.
Rumor was Brodsky had retired in order to expand his collections of first editions, to edit Nabokov’s letters because they had been friends, and write his memoirs. Mostly, he said to reporters, he would simply live. He believed in life, he would say, offering the Jewish toast: “Le Chaim”. It was a marvelous act, all of it. I knew I hadn’t come before because I wouldn’t want to leave. The real world seemed grubby after Brodsky’s.
I could barely keep up with him, slicing through the water. He turned over and did a backstroke, his head always out of the water, the sharp eyes gazing up at the sky but alert, as if he had 360 degree vision. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. I sucked in my gut and kicked hard. Then he pulled himself up to the ledge of the pool and sat.
“I wish you came to see me more often,” he said almost wistfully. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
So I asked, as casually as I could, if he knew of a substance called red mercury. He kicked the water thoughtfully.
“Red mercury is one of the last great Soviet secrets. Few know about it. It was a substance of heavy metals and—but the science is not the issue and I’m afraid I’m not awfully good at it. Years ago, when bomb production was down, there was terrible paranoia about the West. A few physicists felt if they invented something brilliant, they would be honored by Stalin and safe from the purges, poor fools. And they did it. They invented a substance so potent, a very small amount could do enormous damage. A few ounces could produce a nuclear explosion. It had critical properties unlike anything else. There are references as far back as 1950.
“It was only tested a few times in the Arctic Circle. The fallout was so toxic, the mutations were horrible—and covered up, of course. Stalin asked the scientists if they could, theoretically at least, make another substance just as potent, just as Ivan the Terrible had asked his architects about St Basil’s. They said, because they wanted to please him, yes. He had them executed as enemies of the state.”
I was silent.
“If you have encountered red mercury, atomic smuggling is out of hand. It’s something I know a little about. I worry about this. Did you know that many radioactive isotopes have barely any signature, no fingerprints? The Russians don’t keep their books properly, so no one knows what’s missing.”
He wanted to swim and we swam and when he stopped, he talked some more, about nuclear waste, weapons, about radiological spills and the secret cities in Russia. My view I got from Brighton Beach; Brodsky’s was global.
“The Russians will never give it up. When warheads are decommissioned, more plutonium becomes available, it’s degraded, unstable. They don’t care. They see plutonium as a national treasure. They believe we encourage rumors about atomic gangsters in order to cast the Russians as bad boys, out of control. To force them to dump their whole program.”
Brodsky leaned against the side of the pool and pushed his swim goggles on top of his head. “It will get worse. There will be hijackings, kidnappings, accidental explosions. The whole cast of terrorist activity will change,” he said. It was what Roy Pettus had said.
“Who killed Gennadi Mikhailovich, do you think, Artyom? I mean who set it up?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t know.”
“It was dreadful for you, I know. For me, too. We were good old friends. I loved him very much.” This man was straight as a die, I thought; none of the corruption he had encountered had tarnished him. Maybe all that money kept him clean.
“I’m glad we have met again. I have missed you,” he said and I was flattered; I had not met him more than a dozen times in my life.
“You’ll come to dinner tomorrow, I hope,” he added; it was a command.
Chaim Brodsky got out of the pool and onto his feet, allowing me to help him. On the blue tiles of the terrace, I saw a pair of feet like flesh-colored fish. Brodsky gestured to a servant who held out a terry-cloth robe for him, then he pointed to the body that belonged to the fishy feet and said, “Artyom, I’d like to introduce you to my guest Phillip Frye.”
Lily was there at the party; she was there with Phillip Frye.
The sky over Brodsky’s estate was rich as chocolate and the stars had been sprayed around promiscuously as they often were on island nights in the fall. I took Dinah Guilfoyle with me because I didn’t want to go alone; I guess I knew Lily would be there with Frye, and Dinah could still make a spectacular entrance; she wore an old silver Fortuny gown that looked liquid.
Frye gave me a regular guy handshake. He was a tall handsome man with a vividly English face I couldn’t read, ruddy, animated, secret, and it reminded me of those evangelicals like Wilberforce in my history books, always agitating against slavery or sheep grazing. Frye was to publish Brodsky’s memoirs. He spoke beautifully and told good jokes. Lily laughed at his jokes and Frye kept his arm around her shoulders. I felt jealous and lonely.
Brodsky’s place was lit up with lanterns and flares and citronella wands wrapped with lemon-scented yellow flame. Fireflies stacked up over the butterfly trees like planes waiting for permission to land and inside the house a famous pianist played Gershwin songs and Russian folk tunes.
There were movie people, a group of Russian dancers, writers. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Sonny Lippert, but maybe he couldn’t cadge an invite. Across the lawn I saw Teddy Flowers sucking up to a Hungarian billionaire, and a famous poet sat alone eating lox. I quelled my dread with vodka.
With his handsome French wife Paulette, Brodsky moved among his guests happily, and food and drinks were served by beautiful young people in black who smiled without effort.
I drank steadily. Dinah kissed me goodnight and said she had ordered a cab and wanted to get back to Dan. I drank some more. There was delicious stuff: great wines; flavored vodkas from a private distillery Brodsky owned. There was caviar from his own fisheries on the Caspian Sea. Ustinov should have been there, it should have been in his honor, a party for his book. But he was dead.
I wandered out onto the lawn where people drifted up towards the dunes through the old oaks and butterfly trees. Lily Hanes sat on an old wicker chair; she was alone. She had had her hair cut off, short as a boy, I’d noticed earlier, and she looked wonderful, but she was quiet. I had liked the noisy opinionated woman I’d met; something had gone out of her.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she said.
“Can I sit?”
I was surprised when she said “Sure” and I sat.
“Smoke?”
“I quit,” she said. “Sort of.”
“Great party,” I said. Pretty banal. I wanted her a lot. She stretched out her legs, a mile or two of pale gold tanned leg.
“I was surprised to run into Teddy Flowers here.”
Lily said, “Don’t be. Chaim Brodsky owns Teddy Flowers. And Phil. And me, I guess. In the nicest kind of way, of course. He’s pretty benign compared to most of the new media grandees, you know? He reads books. He has taste, at least. They’re all here.”
“All?”
“His stars. The writers. The ass-lickers. Everyone who has anything to do with Russians. Even a few Russians.”
“Did you ever get to see the pages from Ustinov’s book?”
“I asked Phil. He wouldn’t give them to me. He said there was nothing,” she said, but she averted her eyes.
“Can you get them?”
“You’ll have to ask Phillip.”
“You’re still hooked on him, aren’t you?”
“Look.” She turned towards me, shrugged. She had big shoulders for a girl.
“I’m looking.”
“I really don’t want to get involved with this story. You get involved, you get hurt.”
“Is that why you won’t see me?”
“We talked about it at the gym. It was a mistake. You’re too good to waste, Artie. Find some nice woman. Have a life.”
My balls ached with desire. What could I lose? I knew it was over with us. I put my hand on her arm. It was warm from the sun. She got up, then leaned over me and kissed me. Like drowning in honey.
“I have to go now,” she said. “Phillip will be looking for me.”
Brodsky took me aside later and we sat in his study and he asked me to work for him. “Doing what?” I said.
“This and that,” he said. As he had described earlier. Help with his proposals. Help with the memoirs. I had the languages. I was family.
“I’m just a cop.”
“You’re much better than that,” he said mildly. “I need your help, Artyom.” Ask a man for your help if you want his collusion, my father used to say. “I’d like to know who killed Gennadi Mikhailovich, of course,” Brodsky said. “He was a friend. Shall I offer a reward?”
“Will you tell me why your name was in Gennadi’s diary?”
Brodsky smiled sadly. “Yes, of course. We planned to meet in town that day. As I said, we were great friends.”
“May I think about the offer?” I said.
“Of course,” he said, his arm briefly around my shoulders. The gesture did not suit him.
“Be well, Artyom. And let me see more of you. I promised your grandmother once to keep an eye on you.”
I held out my hand. His eyes hardened and I wondered if he thought I should kiss his hand, but instead he kissed me on the cheeks three times, the Russian way.
“Chaim Arnoldovich?” I spoke Russian. He liked that.
“Yes?”
“You keep a boat in Sag Harbor?”
“Yes.”
“What is her name?”
“She is called the Mercury. For the god with winged feet.” He smiled, the benign smile of a courtly old man. “For the Roman god with winged feet,” he said. “The god of commerce and of thieves.”
I stayed on. Through the windows of the pool house, I saw a group clustered around Teddy Flowers. They were watching the late news. On the screen, in Africa, people were dying in the biblical brown dust, piles of bodies tossed in pits. Famine. Cholera. Hacked to death. On the walls, the Matisse glowed.
Outside, on Georgica Pond, the other guests ate and drank and laughed. I opted for the laughter while I could, or maybe it was to prove something to Lily, and I chased a very young girl with wet black hair into the grove of butterfly trees where I caught her for a while.
13
Ricky Tae was dead.
I found him on his face on the floor of my loft, one leg twisted under him. I couldn’t find a pulse. Like a broken animal he lay there, and I knew they had come for me. A few drawers were overturned, a few books tossed on the floor; whoever had murdered him had barely bothered to make it look like a burglary—the desultory gestures were almost a taunt.
I had come home from the island, leaving Dan working his phone, looking for information about Lev from his pals in immigration. The Expressway was jammed with overheated cars stinking up the air and by the time I got out of the tunnel, I was wiped. Before I went home, I stopped across the street for some iced coffee. I sat there in the coffee shop for an hour, more maybe, drinking coffee, looking idly at my building. While I was there, drinking the miserable coffee, they killed him.
Ricky had been coy about his plans, I remembered. Some guy he was meeting—the swimmer?
He had my keys. They probably hit Ricky when he came in with my mail or to borrow some music, the way he always does. They caught him by surprise. Caught him, broke him in half, killed him. In my place. I called Hong Kong. I got Dawn in the middle of the night. I handed over the lousy job of telling her parents to Dawn.
Waiting for the ambulance, I found the plastic bag. It stank from rancid fat. Inside was a bloody leg of lamb, the blood and fat congealed in cold white lumps. In the old days the Russian butchers’ union supplied a lot of the hitmen and they left a ram’s leg for a calling card; this was some half-assed mockery. I knew who had done it.
The EMS people came. They carried Ricky out on a stretcher. I went in the ambulance with him to St Vincent’s. I sat in the same waiting room where I sat the night Gennadi died. A doctor told me he wasn’t dead. “It’s a miracle.”
He wasn’t dead. He was in a profound coma—a vegetable, worse than dead—but not dead. They stuck a lot of tubes in his mouth and arms. They wired him up to equipment that let his body imitate life. Nothing could be done about his brain unless he came out of it. Unless he did, Ricky was a cabbage.
It keeps happening. People don’t die. Instead, they enter some twilight zone, suspended where I can’t get at them. In Israel, my mother sits forgetting herself in her Alzheimer’s half-life; Gennadi Ustinov went into a coma before I could tell him stuff I needed to tell him. Now Ricky.
A few years ago, Aunt Birdie started writing me how many of her friends in Moscow had had strokes. How these old people now lay, like secondhand fruit—Birdie’s phrase—in nursing homes and hospitals where they once locked up dissidents. The land of the nearly dead. I understood why people could prefer Stalin’s time to Brezhnev’s; at least there was a crude certainty.
It always makes me laugh, those fictional cops who deliver themselves of pithy certainties about murder and morality, life and death, then go and beat someone up and feel better. It’s all horseshit. All of it. Everything is horseshit except being really alive.
First Gennadi, now Ricky. They couldn’t talk; you couldn’t bury them. Where was the creep? Where was Lev? Where was he? Where was Tolya?
I went home and waited for Dawn to call me and tell me when the Taes were coming. I looked around and wondered if the creep had tracked his radioactive garbage in with him, if my place was hot, if it would kill me. I phoned Roy Pettus at home and he told me to get out fast until he could get the place checked out, but I had to wait for Dawn’s call.
“I got us on a flight tomorrow morning.” Dawn’s voice was hollow as she gave me the details.
I took a shower and, wrapped in a towel, I sat on the edge of the toilet and smoked a joint and thought about Ricky. I couldn’t stop crying. I think maybe I was crying for myself, too.
I picked the Taes up at JFK the next night. They had gone away sleek and youthful. They came home to New York old. Two tiny shriveled figurines, like broken tin toys someone forgot to turn the key in, they shuffled towards me, lost among the sunburned holidaymakers. They crept through the terminal and into my care and stood, arms by their sides, looking lost while Dawn got the luggage. They leaned on each other helplessly because their son was in the hospital instead of me. When I saw them, I knew I would have to do the thing I was most afraid of; I would have to go to Moscow.
“I been chewing it over,” Danny said when he called. “I really think it was what it seemed. A mob hit on Ustinov. Then they got lucky because this hitman, this Polack, had some other agenda and everyone took their eye off the ball.”
What agenda?
14
There were maybe a hundred pictures of her. A hundred pictures stuffed behind the dresser, underneath a loose floorboard, rolled up and placed carefully in cardboard tubes. All of the pictures were of Lily Hanes.
Head shots. Full-length pictures. The same picture in some cases, blown up so big every pore showed and Lily’s face was distorted, a hideous parody. Some had been drawn inside cartoon bubbles. There were pictures of Lily in fancy underwear, in a fur coat, at the Eiffel Tower, in Red Square. Pictures of Lily as a Playboy centerfold, even the Playboy typeface. These composites had been exquisitely made, elaborately retouched, lovingly airbrushed, each of them placed in the cardboard tubes or inserted into a clear plastic sleeve. It was a professional job.
“
She is a friend?” It was the first time Genia ever showed any interest in me and she held my hand as she pulled out the pictures she had discovered hidden in the room she rented out to transients. She had not rented it again and only when she got ready to make some repairs had she discovered the cache of pictures. Scared, she had called me.
I said, “The last one you rented to was sick?”
She nodded.
I showed her the picture. “He was the one who beat you?”
“Yes.”
Lev had been aiming at Lily Hanes when he shot Ustinov. Somehow, Lev knew Lily Hanes. Had known her. He had planned to kill Lily and he had missed.
Gennadi Ustinov had died accidentally, hit by a bullet as random as those that cut down kids in New York every night, by chance. Lev had been telling Tolya the truth.
I got hold of Roy Pettus. He got his men to take the pictures away. I slept in Genia’s front room that night because the old man was away and she was frightened. Before dawn, someone banged on her door. It was one of Pettus’ men.
The agent said, “Come with me, please.” He was young and he looked terrified.
In the street, I grabbed a gun from my car, then the agent—I never got his name—climbed in a van that was waiting. I got in with him.
The sun was just coming up and the streets were empty. It was Yom Kippur and everyone was home, sleeping or praying or just taking it easy. On this Day of Atonement, in Brooklyn, it was cool, silent and beautiful. The ocean air smelled clean, salty. The young agent pulled up in front of a neat house on a side street in Sheepshead Bay. The fishing boats were just visible and their banners fluttered.
“KATICA’S KENNELS” read the sign outside the house. I recognized the name: it belonged to Zeitsev’s wife, the dog breeder with the unpretty face. The lawn was green and trim. Pink geraniums grew in a window box. Painted wooden cutouts of dogs and cats decorated the front door. Roy Pettus was waiting.
Red Mercury Blues Page 17
