“I’ll wait for you,” she said. “I’ll wait there, look, there’s a telephone. If there is trouble.”
“Go home. There won’t be trouble. Go home. I’ll get a cab.” I put my hand on the black hair that was like silk and kissed her on those bee-stung lips. I kissed her again.
“Marry me,” I said, but she didn’t hear and she was gone with a wave.
I had trouble finding the place. A crude sign indicated the upstairs floors were some kind of student hostel. I held up my lighter and squinted and, in the flickery light from the flame, the ghost of a young African went silently by. He had a serious face, lips pursed with concentration, wire-rimmed glasses. I called out, but he was gone; I wasn’t sure if he was real. There were echoes, metal rang on concrete.
Eventually, I stumbled down a dank flight of stairs. The man named Dubovsky greeted me with a wrestler’s handshake, took fifty bucks off me and motioned me to a chair. “New York Times, “ I said. He whispered to a younger man in the shadows. A few other men sat, legs crossed, smoking.
On a makeshift stage, under hot pink lights, a girl got up and, wiggling, removed her clothes and began rubbing her naked breasts very slowly for our edification. She stripped to Tina Turner, then sat down abruptly on the edge of the stage and was replaced by a second girl who took her clothes off to Edith Piaf.
We were five journalists, so called, me and a Swede, two Danes and Gavin Crowe. We had each paid fifty bucks to Dubovsky for this demonstration at what he called his school of erotic art. The girl on stage was twenty, tops.
“Glad you could come,” Crowe called, patting the seat next to his. I was here because Crowe told Tolya he heard rumors Dubovsky was connected through one of the mafia clans to someone in the atomic mob. “You remember, Artyom, in Moscow rumors are more interesting than fact. There are no facts, all information is tainted, go with the rumors,” Tolya had said. I remembered.
A very pretty girl climbed on the stage and began her act. She had wonderful large breasts, smooth-skinned, big hard rosy nipples.
“What’s her name?” Crowe asked Dubovsky.
“Tell them your name,” he shouted at the girl.
“Madonna,” she said.
“Tits real?” Crowe sniggered.
“My girls? Always.” Dubovsky’s forehead was wet.
Madonna finished her act. There were a couple more acts and then Crowe brayed, “Let’s have the big tits back.”
“It costs more,” Dubovsky said.
“The New York Times will pay,” Crowe answered.
The lights were dimmed. Someone switched on the boom box and there was classical music then the whistling of a train. Madonna reappeared; she wore an old-fashioned cloak and a large hat and long gloves. At the end of the act when she had removed the G-string and was naked, she came down off the stage and stood in front of Crowe and whipped him with her hair. It was Olga Gross all over again. I thought of miserable Olga in her room, the dirty pink bra, the cheap vodka, her fingerless body in a garbage bag on the beach in Brooklyn.
Crowe had one hand on his dick. With the other, he tossed a cigarette onto the floor and reached out and squeezed the girl’s breast hard.
“That’s enough,” said Dubovsky. The girl backed off, the lights went on. Dubovsky got my elbow and escorted me out, up a flight of stairs and into a room where there were a few brocade armchairs and a table with vodka and snacks on a tray.
“Have a drink.” Dubovsky had a mean face with pig’s eyes. His wet mouth never closed over the ragged teeth.
“Welcome to the Eroticacademy,” he said. I could smell him. “Sometimes known as School of the Erotic and Entertaining Arts. Here we make art. Striptease without art would be like gynecological check-up to music.”
I lit another cigarette. Took out a pad and pencil and asked about his school.
Dubovsky got his girls by advertising in provincial newspapers. There was a contract that obliged the girls to live in the building—there were dormitory rooms down the hall. Somehow, he got them to sign up and pay for the training, but he was pretty vague and I couldn’t figure where the profit was. The fee the girls paid was peanuts.
Consider Madonna, Dubovsky said. Once she led a dreary life going nowhere, stamping out metal parts in an automobile factory in Rostov. Now she was “dancing” in Moscow. “We attend to all of our girls’ needs. We house them, we feed them. We do everything, including arranging even the toilet paper. In exchange, they give away all their human rights,” he noted and added “ha ha”. He had eyes that were pinholes of contempt.
“I insist on physical beauty and an inborn artistic sense.”
No girl could be more than twenty-six, at which point her date expired. Here, at the school, they did dancing lessons, posture, fashion and what Dubovsky called “flexibility and the Oriental Arts”; I did not think he meant kung fu. Without his permission, no girl left the premises. Without it, not even a phone call, he said. He drank some vodka. “I understand women. You know what I was before I was businessman?”
“What?” I said.
“Gynecologist,” he said.
Dubovsky spoke some English mixed with the coarse Russian. “In daytime, girls study. At night, demonstrations, for visiting journalists, also businessmen—potential employers.”
“What kind of work?”
Dubovsky poured me vodka from a bottle on the table.
“Work. Traveling work. We are good to them.”
Dubovsky’s wife Vera appeared and helped herself to a drink. She was platinum blonde in a Lurex sweater with a voice so shrill it could crack Coke bottles. It was Vera who had decided the medical profession was too corrupt for a man of his sensibility—she actually said this—and suggested the school.
“I was nurse in circus,” said Vera.
“When the Soviets went, the stopper came out of the bottle,” Svetlana had told me. “Plop”—she stuck her finger in her cheek and made the sound of a cork popping. “Moscow became sin city. Sex shows. Floating gay disco. Hookers of all kinds, and all dying to meet a bizinessman.”
Businessmen were the new comrades, the new nomenklatura, the new Party members. It was already old news in Moscow, but not for me. I had read about it, seen it on endless breathless television reports at home. But I had left a priggish, puritanical country obsessed by the notion that capitalism was the devil’s work, where sex was rarely mentioned; business was to socialism as sin to the Catholic Church. And now they were everywhere, the hookers, the businessmen, World Bank guys in tasseled loafers I ate breakfast with at the hotel. Russian venture capital hoods drove Rolls-Royces and Dubovsky had his school. The new bizinessman didn’t want a night at the Bolshoi, he wanted dirty fun. Dubovsky could do the business.
But where was Dubovsky’s profit? It bothered me. “An investment,” said Dubovsky. “The girls agree to turn over a percentage of their pay when they begin work.”
“What percentage?” I scribbled stuff earnestly like I saw reporters do. From next door Sting sang something pious on a stereo. “Where do the girls work?”
“A few in Moscow, mostly we send them in other countries. Good jobs.”
The wife nodded.
“Firms who make showbiz in South America or Middle East.” He warmed to the subject.
“With Arabic countries, of course, I am not eager. These men are not gentlemen. But you got to take a chance. Work is work and, of course, Dubovsky is providing a kind of service to his countrywomen,” he said. “I make order out of the chaos in women’s heads.”
I was pretty dumb not to spot it right away: Dubovsky ran a brothel. The demonstration was the come-on; after that you took your pick.
“I want to talk to you, man to man. You understand.” I showed him a roll of bills. “Get rid of the woman.”
He told his wife to get lost.
“If I want to take one of the girls away, to make, like you say, showbiz?”
“No problem. If the price is right.”
“You had a girl n
amed Olga Gross?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Who remembers? She was good? I take only first-quality Russian girls. You want this Olga Gross?”
“Sure. Look it up. I can pay. You got girls already traveling with guys like me?”
“Sure, I got girls everywhere, Italy, Rumania, Croatia. Global market. Russian girls are best.”
“USA?”
“Sure, Brighton Beach, Los Angeles, why not.”
“I want a private demonstration.”
“Which one?”
“Olga.”
“Try one other.”
“Your best girl. Young. Clean,” I said. “Big tits.”
“How long?”
“A couple hours.”
“For the New York Times,” he said, “two hundred dollars.”
“Give me the one named Madonna.”
I gave him money. I showed him more. “And find out about Olga for me.”
Gavin Crowe sauntered in, sipping Scotch from a plastic pint bottle and zipping up his fly.
“She’s at the end of the hall,” said Dubovsky.
There was no dancing. The girl who called herself Madonna lay on a stained cotton bedspread, her legs spread, her mouth in a parody of a lascivious smile as I walked through the door. A boom box was turned on low. I reached over and turned it up; it was Billie Holiday, but I’m not sure the girl had any idea what the music was; it was just noise.
She was much younger than I’d thought, maybe seventeen. She rubbed herself. She had a fantastic body. She was tasty goods. Succulent. But she was a kid. She was also badly bruised, the purple marks like fruit stains on her pale body.
“Get dressed.” I grabbed a robe from a chair. I threw it in her direction.
“Don’t you like me?” She tried to fondle me. “Should I give you a blow job?”
I put the robe over her and said, “You can speak Russian with me. Get dressed. I want to talk.”
She pulled the robe on and dressed inside it, like a schoolgirl. In T-shirt and shorts, she looked like a child.
“Did you know a girl named Olga Gross? Anna was her stage name.” I lit her cigarette and put some money on the table.
“Anna was a good friend. Is she well?”
“Have you been abroad working?” I asked, putting some dollars on the bedside table. She glanced over.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Germany. Croatia. Ukraine. Rumania. You won’t say I talked to you?”
“I won’t tell.”
“I need money to get help. I am sick.”
“Sick from what?”
“Tell me about Olga.”
“She’s dead. I’m sorry.”
The girl bit down on her lower lip.
“Where else have you been?”
“I don’t know the names, in Arabia.”
“Dubai? Kuwait?”
“Maybe.”
“Will you help me?” She grabbed my hand as if for her life. It was what Olga Gross said to Tolya in the Batumi in Brooklyn. I nodded. She tried to smile, but her lips were cracked and the lesions around her mouth were ugly. I should have spotted it sooner.
“You carried samples?”
She nodded.
“You knew?”
“No.”
“What did you think it was?”
“We thought we were going abroad to work. We were working girls. Dancers.”
“People asked you to make deliveries.”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“Who to?”
“Men. Border towns. Croatia. Germany. We took what they asked. We put the packages in with our makeup.”
Like Olga, like Lev, this girl had carried radioactive samples across the borders, then spilled out into the West with them, lost among the refugees and the chaos.
“Did you ever find out what you were carrying?”
“Eventually.”
I whispered: “Plutonium?”
She nodded.
“Other things?”
“Yes.”
“Red mercury?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“One night we—me and Olga—were in a little town in Croatia. A disgusting place, horrible food, drunken soldiers. We ran away to our room. Olga liked a dare. Let’s look, Olga said. We thought there might be drugs. Olga opened a package. There was something red. It looked like nail polish. We knew it wasn’t drugs. Later, someone told us.”
I showed her Ivan Kowalski’s picture.
“He worked as an escort for the girls.”
The door flew open, the girl cowered against the wall, Dubovsky and the wife appeared and she started slapping the girl. Dubovsky had a 9-millimeter pistol, a Gluck. He held it at my head while the wife worked the girl over. I just watched. They made me watch. I wasn’t Clint Eastwood. I wasn’t Harrison Ford. I wasn’t anybody, just a schlemiel who hated his life right now. I didn’t help her. I couldn’t fix it. I didn’t save her. I felt like I’d been hanging on by a bungee cord and the elastic had given out. I just stood there with the cold metal against my head and Billie Holiday playing and the girl screaming from pain, certain that if I moved I’d be dead and so would she. I think that’s what the good Germans always said.
“You want this for your girlfriend?” Dubovsky laughed. “It can be arranged,” and I prayed to God he was bluffing, that Svetlana had the brains to get the hell away from this dump. Was she outside waiting? Did they know?
The wife hit Madonna again with her open hand and there was a crack. The girl fell down.
“Enough,” Dubovsky shouted. “Enough!” I guess he needed his girls alive. Here was his profit, these girls, like this one huddled in a corner trying to stop blood pouring from her mouth with her hand. Dubovsky’s girls were atomic mules.
6
Svetlana was waiting in her car, feet on the dashboard, reading a paperback novel, when I stumbled out of that hellhole into the street. There was something fearless about her, like the way she drove. She took me home, made eggs, ran the tub. While I sat in the warm water, she started making phone calls, fixing to get Madonna out of Dubovsky’s place. In the morning, when I left her, Svetlana was at it again, cajoling, begging, laughing, demanding, offering an exchange of favors. “Be careful,” she called and kissed me as I left.
The Novosti building lobby stank. It was the overripe apple stink of disinfectant and of vomit I had smelled at St Vincent’s the night Ustinov died. The stink of Moscow mornings.
When I was a kid, Novosti had been a thriving honeycomb of a place where Birdie worked as a secretary for a while on one of the English language magazines. I used to visit so I could look at the girls in the magazines and practice English on Birdie’s friends, other Moscow foreigners who all knew each other.
Dozens of magazines had been published here, disseminating Soviet propaganda, but with a sugar coating for foreign consumption. Now, part of the building housed the “Up and Down Club”; Tolya said it was the dirtiest sex club in Moscow.
I wandered corridors Kafka would have recognized for nearly an hour, knocking on doors, peering into dusty rooms where plants had died on the window sills. I stumbled on archives of photographs and magazines. It was a whole history of the public relations endeavor that was the Soviet Union. I asked about Ivan Kowalski; no one knew anything. I asked for a Lev Kowalski, thinking maybe his comrades called him that, and met blank faces.
On the walls of the corridors were black and white stills from Soviet Life in the sixties: a man driving a car with a bear in the back; Khrushchev and JFK shaking hands. I thought how the old leaders, at their best, looked like animals: Brezhnev looked vigorous, like a bear. Not quite human, but powerful, animated.
“Hello?”
In the last room at the end of a corridor, a pair of forlorn guys, both in glasses, both wearing cardigans, sat around a room fiddling with bits of paper. They jumped up when I entered, glad of company. They shook my hand with that stiff jerky European shake;
they bowed slightly. I had forgotten. I said I was a reporter with the New York Times. Just looking around, I said.
“You have heard of this fellow, Nicolae Borescu?” the one called Rudi asked hopefully.
“Who?” I offered them smokes. They helped themselves eagerly. I hated this.
“He is Rumanian publishing magnate. They tell us he buys our magazines, to make new Russian Life Magazine.”
“Don’t bet the ranch,” I said. Rudi’s English was minimal; his comrade spoke none. I felt sorry for them. I reintroduced myself in Russian.
“But perhaps you know Mr Chaim Brodsky. He is also planning to buy some publications, perhaps all of Novosti.”
“You know this for sure? Is there someone who can confirm this?”
“Sure. Sure. Go, Sasha.” Rudi pushed his colleague towards the door. “Go. So,” he said, standing at attention. “Tell me, Artemy Maximovich, how it is in New York City.” He was wistful, hankering for news, using the patronymic as if I were a visitor who required respect.
I showed him Lev’s picture. He did not hesitate.
“Sure. Of course. Ivan was our friend. He disappeared. We thought he was drunk. Maybe cocaine. Maybe he got sick, we thought. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. I’m trying to contact him. Can you tell me anything?”
Rudi was voluble, thrilled by the presence of a visitor, and he swept clean a cracked leather armchair, gesturing towards it, sucking on his cigarette with anticipation. “Wait.”
Disappearing into a closet, Rudi came back with a large folder. He held it against himself.
“Ivan was a specialist. He was a kind of genius, you could say. Ivan retouched photographs. He remade them. Ivan could make people disappear. Look.”
Rudi opened the portfolio and I saw: pictures of the presidium gathered on Lenin’s tomb for May Day. In one, Andropov had no hat. In another, his hat was on. It was brilliantly done for its day—you could alter anything on a computer now, no sign would remain—but back then it was painstaking stuff, an art. I thought of Lily. Of the pictures of her he had fixed.
Red Mercury Blues Page 22
