Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  There was the low babble of voices, the distant slap of the ocean, and the fishing banners in the breeze, but nothing else. A few of Pettus’ men worked silently around the house. They were wearing hot suits. Silently, Roy handed me a mask. I put it on. We walked across the lawn; it was wet from the dew. I could feel the pulse in my neck. My mouth was dry.

  “I want you to see. I want you to look. You can’t go in,” Pettus said and pointed to a ladder set up underneath a window.

  “You went in.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  “Two minutes. Two minutes, detective, that’s all. Les, give him a suit and take him in,” he called to one of the men in protective gear.

  Inside the little house was a scene straight from hell.

  All I could think of was a newsreel I once saw about the effects of radiation on pigs. Pigs. Pink pigs.

  I remembered that. I remembered the newsreel. Seven hundred pink pigs had been wrapped in silvery stuff, like tin foil, and chained inside pens the shape of mailboxes. The pigs couldn’t move inside the pens; the pigs filled up the pens, and they were chained inside and the boxes locked and left out on the sand a few yards from ground zero somewhere in Nevada.

  After the bomb went off and the mushroom cloud went up, the pigs kept squealing. They seemed to have been fried alive but they squealed; it was all you could hear: the death-like quiet of the moment after the bomb and in it, the shrill endless helpless squealing of seven hundred pigs.

  In the kennels was the same eerie noise of helpless animals baying for life. The dogs in the cages were dead and dying. There was fur on the steel bars where they had tried to ram themselves free. There were teeth on the floor, and bone. Here and there were the charred remains of little animals. A cat screamed somewhere, then ran into view, its skin hanging off its backbone. You could see its skeleton like X-rays.

  Pettus had to drag me away: We stood on the pavement and he yanked off his hood.

  “What was it?”

  “We think it was a very small device. A small amount of fertilizer, some chemicals. A homemade bomb. It didn’t go off.”

  “What killed them?”

  “I don’t know. Something that was inserted in the weapon. Something that would have turned it into a crude nuclear device. Something toxic enough to do this even without the explosion. It could be anything, but I’d put money on cesium. Soluble salts maybe. Add water and stir.”

  “How come it didn’t go off?”

  “Accident. A screw-up. Luck. Luck,” he snarled this and glanced at the building.

  The first person in on the dawn shift was in the hospital, Pettus said. When she arrived and opened the door she didn’t know what she was seeing. She took a deep breath; it made her sicker. The night man was already lying in his own vomit.

  It was a message from the creep. From Lev. Up yours, it said. Up yours to the mafia that had cut him loose and abandoned him. To the authorities. To me.

  “Everyone out,” I heard Pettus shout from the lawn. I stripped off the protective gear.

  “Your apartment is OK, though, detective. I got one of the men to give it a thorough going-over. The Geiger counter didn’t even register.”

  One of Pettus’ men had a cellular phone and I grabbed it and called Zeitsev. He was cool. He knew nothing.

  “He got in touch. We threw him out. I told him ‘What do we want with samples of this shit? We are legitimate businessmen.’ You’ve seen what he did to my wife’s business? You’ve seen this?” There was cold rage in his voice. He hung up. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “If the bomb went off?”

  Pettus said, “It would have contaminated the whole block. Maybe more. The copycats would have a field day.”

  “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Pettus said. “He’s close. I can smell him.”

  When we found him on the beach, Lev was bleeding badly, trying to drag himself under the boardwalk as if it offered protection. He tried to stumble to his feet, then fell over. He performed this act as if it were a ritual, over and over. Sand got in his mouth and he tried to wipe it out; it was full of blood.

  Blood covered his jacket, the plaid shirt, his pants, his hands. Tufts of fine blond hair stuck out of the skull-like head and his cheeks were sucked in like an old man’s; he had no teeth left.

  “Where’s the shit?” I said in Russian. “Where is it?”

  “I have it,” a voice said behind me, and I turned and there was Tolya Sverdloff, holding the two suitcases in his hands like a porter. There was blood on his leather coat and it blew open in the brisk wind driving in off the ocean.

  Pettus said, “For Chrissake, put them down. Is this Sverdloff?” he asked me.

  “Where the hell did you go?”

  Sverdloff gestured at Lev. “I had to get the suitcases.”

  “I know about your call sign. Red Mercury. What the fuck does it mean?”

  “I called myself the nuclear DJ. It was my joke. A long time ago.”

  “A joke?”

  “Yes, a joke. That was how we lived, by jokes. You forgot.”

  Hands cuffed behind him, Lev stumbled blindly around, tripping on garbage piled up under the boardwalk.

  This man had killed Gennadi Ustinov. Olga Gross. The old man in Penn Station. He had come after me and Lily. Ricky was in a coma at St Vincent’s because of him. He left a trail a mile wide. He looked pathetic, though, incapable of so much violence, but what did I expect? Did I want him to shout “Top of the world” like Cagney in White Heat?

  Instead, Lev stumbled towards me. He tried to butt me with his head. He fell flat on his face.

  Roy Pettus grabbed my arm.

  “Let me,” I said.

  “I want him. I want him to talk to me. I want to know the rest of the story. Ask him.”

  I asked him in Russian but he only snarled and tried to crawl away. I recognized in him boys I went to school with, Russian boys with stringy blond hair and high cheekbones who lived in communal apartments that stank; we despised them because their parents were peasants. They had grandmothers who kept icons and silently recited the ancient liturgy: Beat the Jews. Beat the Jews.

  I looked at Lev. His people were the anti-Semites and drunks; they had been the Party faithful; they were Leonid Zalenko’s fervent followers.

  “What about Lily? What about Lily Hanes?” I asked him in Russian, but he only grunted—like the pigs in the newsreel.

  Lev tried to get up. Come on, I thought. Get up. Come after me. I want to kill you. I want you.

  I had my gun out.

  “You fucking killed my friend,” I shouted.

  “He tried to kill Ricky,” I said to the others. “You understand?”

  Lev shook his head. “No. No.”

  Tolya held on to the suitcases. “When was Ricky attacked?”

  I told him.

  Tolya said, “He’s telling the truth,” but I didn’t want to hear.

  “Don’t do this, detective,” Pettus said, and I heard the sirens coming.

  With an expression of hatred I had never seen on another human being, mouth making mewling noises like the dying cat, like the pigs chained to their pens, with whatever force he had left, Lev lunged for Tolya and the suitcases. He tried to kick at them, kick them open and give us all a whiff of death.

  I don’t really know if I shot him out of pity because he was like a wounded animal or because I hated him. He fell over, crawled for a minute along the sand, then lay there while it turned red under him.

  Tolya said, “He was telling the truth, you know, about your friend, at least.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was with him.”

  Was it true? Was that why Pettus’ men couldn’t find any trace of radioactivity in my loft? If it was true, who beat up on Ricky?

  “Is this also a joke?” I said.

  “Come to Moscow,” he said. “I’ll make you remember.”

&nbs
p; PART THREE

  Moscow

  1

  At Sheremetyevo Airport, on the other side of the barrier, Tolya was waiting, wrapped in his leather coat. He stood at the back of the crowd that was packed in solid against the barrier and he towered over it.

  I had slept most of the trip. As I made my way through customs, I felt like someone had hit me over the head. Up close, in the greenish lights of the terminal, Tolya looked somehow older than when I remembered, older than when I saw him ten days earlier in Brighton Beach.

  “I’m here to take you home,” he said. I wanted to run away.

  It felt freakishly warm that morning in the countryside. Thirty miles from Moscow, the woods crackled with the sound of Russians picking mushrooms, or maybe it was my imagination. Everything came back with those sounds, the crisp snap of leaves, the shouts of delirium over a good mushroom crop, the mournful voices of the elderly, celebrating the sadness of the season. Soon there would be weeping. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  At the edge of a stand of slim pale birch trees, at a bend in the river, a woman in a white bathing suit stood, pensively, up to her knees in the water, smoking a cigarette. She had dark hair cropped very short. The trees made a filter for the light that fell on her bare tanned skin like a lace dress. For a moment there was no other sound except the noises from the woods, and music from a radio in a café on the narrow beach. It was playing “American Pie”.

  “Svet! Svet! It’s me. Toli.”

  Tolya Sverdloff’s voice boomed from behind me, and he rolled down the bank to the river like a kid or a dog. The girl in the river looked up, burst into a smile and ran towards him, jumped in his arms and hugged him. She was a big, soft girl, but he carried her easily up the hill and held her towards me as if she were a gift. He took off his jacket and wrapped her in it.

  “You’re crazy to be swimming this time of year.”

  “Put me down,” she said in Russian, laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and put her gently on her bare feet on a pile of leaves. She had mud on her ankles, like brown socks. I remembered how the sand on the beach in Nikolina Gora was deceptive, how it just sat on top of the mud so you got brown socks when you walked in it. I’d had sand in my shoes when I watched Lev die on Brighton Beach. When I killed him.

  “I’m so glad you’re here.” Her eyes were shining with pleasure.

  “I saw her only yesterday. She gets carried away,” Tolya said to me. “This is my cousin Svetlana Orlova. We sometimes call her Kitty.”

  “For the character in Anna Karenina?” I asked inanely.

  “No, for Gunsmoke.” Her English was good; I realized she thought I was American.

  “When we were children,” said Tolya, holding her hand, joining her game, “we got bootleg westerns. We used to act out western movies here in the country. I was always Jesse James. Svet was always Miss Kitty.”

  “All the time Tolya was talking I could feel my heart racing. He turned to me. “And this is my friend Artemy. His Western name is Artie.”

  Svetlana looked straight at me. She held out her hand and I fell in love with her.

  2

  “Not my cup of tea, darling,” Birdie said, letting me in the door, waving a paperback book at me. “Not like that Arthur Hailey,” she added with a melodramatic little sigh. “Or that clever Stephen King. Such a smart boy.”

  Birdie Golden smoothed the pages of her book twice, then replaced it in its regular spot in the glass-fronted bookcase that she had brought with her to Moscow more than sixty years ago. Her novels were meticulously lined up, her name written in the flyleaf of each one in the flowing cursive taught by the New York public schools a long time ago.

  Tolya had dropped me off and I found my aunt in the same apartment on the outskirts of Moscow where she always lived. She was sitting at her bridge table in the window, one leg under her like a teenager. The front door was open; she was expecting me, and she got up and kissed me briskly as if I had only walked out that morning instead of a quarter century ago.

  “Birdie knows the value of a good book,” she always said, and she was no snob, for almost no one wrote a better tale than that Arthur Hailey, Birdie said. Of course she knew it was rubbish, not literature at all, but such a good tale.

  “A good yarn, am I right? You always loved that word when I was teaching you English. A good yarn, you would say, but is it woolly? Sit,” she added. “On the good chair. It’s not cold in here? It’s cold? Am I wrong? You got big, Artyom.”

  She went into the kitchen and fussed with a teapot.

  “Your English is good.” She was brisk. “I taught you well. Am I right?”

  Birdie taught me English with a New York accent from the time I was five or six. She “walked” me around the city, reading to me from Alfred Kazin’s Walker in the City and Gorki’s Journals. Later there was Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Washington Irving. We admired Thomas Paine and she made me read Fenimore Cooper and Poe, Henry James and Melville, Lincoln Steffens and O. Henry and Edith Wharton. We worked our way through Dos Passos and Hart Crane, Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw. We visited Harlem with James Baldwin and Long Island with Fitzgerald. What the books must have cost Birdie in favors I never knew, but she made me love New York long before I got there.

  “You’ll have cake.” It was a command. I could see she was not ready to discuss Gennadi Ustinov. There was too much pain in it for her; they had been friends for a long time. When things were bad, he helped her out.

  “I’d love cake.”

  Through a curtain, I saw the tiny kitchen was jammed with things I’d sent and she hoarded: boxes of cookies, jars of coffee, packages of support hose, a salami, chocolate, aspirin and cheese, all piled on a shelf in promiscuous disarray. Waiting for the kettle to boil, she held up to the light a box of fancy soap I got at the duty free. She sniffed it, inspecting the legend of the goods from a half-remembered place, trying to decode the meaning. She came back from the kitchen with a tray of cake, pickled eggplant, cookies, bread and butter, and tea.

  She was unchanged, except for the shrunken bones and wrinkled skin that hung on them, loose, like an old slipcover. She was as opinionated as ever, and just as alert. I noticed she used terms of endearment more often, though, but maybe she just felt it was an old woman’s only way to seduce. Birdie had never been a huggy woman, but age had mellowed her a little. She now sprinkled her talk with Yiddish phrases as if her own childhood had reclaimed her.

  “Sit. There, on the good chair, sweetheart, by the window,” she said again pointing at the folding chair that belonged to her bridge set, her legacy. “We brought our furniture. We planned to stay.”

  Out the window, carefully patched with newspaper, the raw ground around Birdie’s apartment house was visible. The buildings stuck up like rotten teeth from muddy gums. Directly below her apartment was a state store where pensioners waited in line.

  Birdie came and stood next to me, leaning hard on my arm.

  “Every day they come. Every day they wait in line. You know what I think? They wait from habit. From habit. And for leftovers that go cheap. You know what? I went in the shop first time in two years and I saw things I never saw since I was a girl. Pork roasts. Chickens with flesh on the bone. The old ladies come to stare at things they will never eat before the worms eat them. One old lady hit the shopkeeper with her handbag. You know what happens if he should sell you for less?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Don’t humor me. He finds himself hanging on a meat hook in his icebox. Sooner or later. The mafia takes care of these things. Mafia. Some mafia, am I right?”

  Birdie returned to her chair and I sat opposite her. “Can I smoke?”

  She was irritated. “No,” she said.

  “The mafia! This is all anyone talks about these days. This is perfect, here in the capital of moaning and whining, finger-pointing, blame-laying. There is no discipline. No respect,” she muttered. “Birdie is pretty disgusted, you know? The mafia. You don�
��t like your lot, you should improve it, not blame it on the mob.

  “From mafia, of course, I knew the real thing,” she said, drifting back in time to her childhood when, as a little girl in the lovely big house in Flatbush, she had met real mafia gentlemen in alpaca coats and Homburg hats. They tipped their hats to her mother and brought her gifts of barley sugar lollipops in the shapes of flowers and animals that came all the way from Italy. Birdie’s father was a top lawyer who knew men around town, and in this way she encountered Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel when they came to call. This was real mafia.

  I listened and Birdie rambled and I wasn’t sure she understood that I had been away at all. There was a noise like a cup rattling on a saucer when she talked; she had succumbed to false teeth and they fit badly. Birdie was so proud of her teeth in the old days. “You know how I earned money to come to Moscow?” she used to say. “Milk. I had marvelous teeth. In New York City, I posed for milk advertisements.”

  Birdie sat and drank tea and talked. It was bad times, she said, but if bad times meant you could no longer afford to get your shoes heeled, if you had any pride left you did not go on the street to sell them. You stayed home. If you were on a fixed rouble pension, you sat home and watched the new millionaires on television.

  She, Birdie, always had a little something put away, she told me. After sixty years in Moscow she was still Abe Golden’s daughter and she never went completely without. She picked up a photograph in a painted wood frame and held it to the murky light. In it I saw Birdie Golden, aged twenty-two, wearing a summer dress and white leather sandals, standing in Red Square. Birdie had arrived with two Vuitton steamer trunks to join the revolution. Abe Golden’s daughter traveled first class.

  Birdie Golden would go first class again, she said. She often thought about herself in the third person, particularly when she was trying to work out her next move. In the mirror over the glass-fronted bookcase she sometimes caught a glimpse of herself and was startled, she confided to me. Younger people never understood that you didn’t get to feeling old; you were just yourself, and if you were Birdie, you were always twenty-two, always ready to take on the world, ugly but sexy. The mirror held only an old woman, thin hair in an untidy bun, gray eyes thick with cataracts. “Enough with the self-pity,” she said half to herself.