The phone beeped me now, but it was only a message from Keyes. I knew I better pay some attention to the case I was supposed to be working in the first place. I needed the money. I needed money if I was going to take care of Lily. It was a decent job and Keyes was a good firm. I liked the security work they put my way, it paid the rent.
After they threw me out of the hospital I went back to the hotel and sat up most of the night re-reading the case.
Keyes Security is based in New York, but it has branches in LA and in London, where they run the European business. They’re always looking for ex-cops with some education who can do a couple of languages. Me, I do Russian, Hebrew, some French.
The private security business is big – it’s been getting bigger ever since those freaks hit the World Trade Center last year. People are scared of everything and they’re probably right. You can’t go anywhere without people talking about bombs and nukes, terrorism, black-mail, money scams and the shit-for-brains thugs who’ll do anyone for a quick buck. There’s always a creep who just invented some new form of craziness.
Europe is easy pickings. With Nato getting bigger and borders down, you could travel from Vladivostok right over to London without anyone bothering you. And the more wired up we get, the less anyone pays attention to the little guys on the ground. You can stare at your computer and miss the point. Sometimes you have to get into the street. Anyhow, thugs like the creep who beat up Lily live under the radar.
When we were still at home, thinking of taking a vacation in London, I asked around if there was something going where I could earn vacation money, buy me and Lily ten days away in Europe. All Keyes had was a paper case. A dead man’s bank account. His name was Eric Levesque. The plan was, after New Year’s in London we’d go to Paris together where Levesque’s account was so I could finish the case. Lily would hang out and show me around.
But she left me in London and the next time I saw her she was in the hospital in Paris. I didn’t care about the Levesque case now. I didn’t care about anything except Lily. But I was in Paris and I needed the money Keyes was paying me.
The case involved a long-term high-interest account at a big New York bank that has branches all over the world, including Paris. A couple hundred thousand was in the account, a lot of money by my standards but nothing, as someone said, that would turn the head of a twenty-five-year-old dot.com exec, even one who crashed in the bear market last year. Two-hundred-forty thou, roughly, the account opened in 1994 and untouched after that. Three years later, Levesque was killed in an air crash off the coast of Santa Catalina Island. The plane went down, most of the bodies were trapped in the broken fuselage. Levesque was dead, divorced, no kids, no family. Poor bastard, I thought, when I originally put together the file in New York. There was no one who seemed to know him. All that remained was the bank account no one claimed.
The account could have gone unnoticed for a lot longer. If you have a couple of bucks in an account and it’s costing the bank more to process it than you’re worth, they might pay some attention. But a quarter mill? The interest piles up, the statements go out, no one returns them, the bank assumes everything’s fine. It could sit around growing interest for a long time. Which is what happened with Levesque.
His statements went to a PO box in LA, the box got paid for, the bank didn’t even know Levesque was dead. No one at the bank was sitting around reading airline lists of dead passengers. Levesque wasn’t famous. Who would care?
The trouble started a couple months back when someone tried to withdraw money from Levesque’s account from a branch of the American bank in a Paris suburb. Someone went into the bank, wrote out one of Levesque’s checks for the equivalent of twenty grand in French francs and forged the signature. Twenty grand was enough so that the teller went to her boss to verify the signature, but by the time she got back to the window, the customer had vanished. The signature looked OK at first, but the bank checked it. It was a forgery. The bank took a look into Levesque’s business and found out he was dead.
So who the hell wrote the check? What kind of asshole goes around writing big checks on a dead man’s account?
Someone called in Keyes – the bank I figured – and Keyes gave me the job. I ran the case in New York and LA, did the paperwork and followed up the trail as best I could. I tracked down a couple dozen possible but remote relatives; they were the wrong Levesques.
I filed a report. All that was left was running it in France where the check had been written. Sonny Lippert told me not to take the case. It was a dead end, Sonny said. “Paperwork. And money,” he said. “Just money. It’s not for us, Art,” he said. “It’s bullshit this kind of work. Paper work. For girls. You’ll hate yourself. You’ll die of boredom.” Then he tried to get me on a job involving a trip back to Moscow and I ran, so to speak, as fast as possible. I had been back to Moscow. Once was enough.
I didn’t care what Sonny Lippert said. It was work. It paid OK, it kept them sweet at Keyes where they like me, my languages, that I have nice suits and I can hold a knife and fork right. Also, the job got me to Europe. It was what Lily wanted.
I fell asleep on top of the Levesque case file. When I woke up, it was Friday. I took a shower, put on clean clothes, picked up the folder and started walking. I walked across Paris where winter fog sat on the buildings and crept under your coat, but I walked anyway, found a café, ordered coffee and re-read the file.
I worked my phone, re-checked my machine and tried Sonny. I drank the creamy brew they brought me, tossed some change onto the table and walked away. I don’t know what I was looking for. I couldn’t sit still. I crossed the place de la Concorde.
There were homeless on the Paris streets, curled up against the buildings. I passed a long line, mostly men, outside a church with a soup-kitchen serving breakfast. On the rue de Rivoli a middle-aged hooker bargained with a Japanese tourist over a blow job. It was early, a pale film of snow was already on the streets, and from the time I left the café I felt someone on my tail, but this time I knew it was only the inside of my head. Everything spooked me here.
Paris. City of Light. Christ!
I was out of breath when I found myself in front of a bookstore with English books, maps, magazines. I recognized the name. It was the store where Lily bought the books Gourad found in her hotel room. I needed a map of Paris. I went in. If there was somebody following me, he’d disappear.
A few minutes later I was leaning against a table piled with books when I heard the voice.
“Artie Cohen?”
I backed away, hands in my pockets.
“Artie. My God, it is you, isn’t it? That’s what they still call you now, Artie?” He hesitated, looked at me as if he’d fumbled it, turned red. “Am I wrong? Oh, God. I’m so sorry, maybe I’m wrong. You don’t recognize me.”
I thought: who is this guy? What does he want with me? How the hell does he know who I am? I wanted to lash out at everyone. I had to stop; it was making me panicky and useless. He looked harmless, this guy who wandered into a bookstore early in the morning; it was someone I met at a party once, maybe, or worked a job with a million years ago.
I said, “Excuse me?”
“It’s been a really long time. I figured you wouldn’t recognize me.” His accent was American. New York, I thought. Like mine. He grinned and held out his hand. “I’m Joe Fallon. Josef Fialkov, I mean.”
“You’re kidding.”
He took off his glasses. When I looked at him hard, I could just make out the resemblance to the kid I once knew, a ghost of a memory. Fialkov was bigger, heavier, older. But it was him. Joey Fialkov.
He said, “Can we get a cup of coffee or something?”
There wasn’t anything I could do for Lily except sit in the lousy hospital. So I said, “Sure. You really have fucking changed.”
“You still living in New York, Artie?”
“How the hell did you recognize me?”
“I saw a picture of you somewhere. The Post, maybe
? The News? You were some kind of hero cop, weren’t you? I don’t remember the case.”
“It was the News.”
“I heard you were in New York. My mom heard. You know I tried to call you once years ago. I left a message.”
“I never got it.” It was a lie. One of those things you forget about. It was a long time back when I didn’t want anything to do with Russia. I still don’t.
“I looked through the window here, I saw you. Jeez, I can’t tell you how happy I was to see you, Art, swear to God. How come you’re in Paris? You have business here? You still living in New York?” Fallon talked a lot.
“Sure,” I said again. “Yeah. You?”
“Son-of-a-bitch. Me, too.” He looked out at the snow. “I wish I was home. New York, I mean.”
I peered at him again. “You really are Fialkov, aren’t you?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a wallet. Stuffed inside was a crumpled black and white photograph of him and his parents and sister.
He held it up to the light. “I was a cute kid,” he laughed. “But small, and all the hair. I thought I was Paul McCartney. I always got shit for the hair, remember? How about breakfast? We could go somewhere.”
We left the bookstore and went to a café two doors down. Fallon went up to the bar for cigarettes. He was a well-set-up guy, big – my height – and a couple of years younger. Fallon moved easily. He had on good black cords, a rumpled red pullover, leather jacket. He looked completely American.
I hadn’t seen Joey for, what was it, almost thirty years. Josef Igorovich Fialkov. For a couple of years we overlapped at school. He was always ahead of his grade, and we hung out because he was the only kid I ever knew who really cared about jazz.
I taught him. I played him my Hot Fives album, then I discovered Stan Getz and he finagled The Steamer for me, God knows how. I still have it.
Joey fixed things, it was what I remembered most, Joey could fix anything, a radio, the purchase of a time-share in a Beatles publicity photo, chocolate, an excuse to cut school. Once he re-wired a lamp for my mother. He hung around our place all the time; my mother said he had charm which was not a Soviet quality, so she liked him for it. He was a freak to his own family; they were the kind of working-class family we all despised, good Party people, loyal, dogged.
Fialkov’s family lived in a crummy apartment building on the outskirts of Moscow. The father was a Stalinist prick who named his kid Josef for his hero and beat the shit out of him. He was a maintenance man at a big newspaper, a drunk who came home, when he came home, filled with the righteous propaganda he read off the presses.
The mother worked in a meat factory; you could smell her when you went to their place. She kept icons in both rooms. The ancient photograph of Joey and his family was so potent it sucked me back so I could smell the past.
Over coffee I said to Fialkov, “You speak the lingo here?”
“My mother made me learn French. She was a meat packer but she had pretensions. She had relatives in Belgrade, it gave her an air. Somehow, in her mind having foreigners in the family elevated her, you know? Maybe she brought them home with the sausages.”
“My mother made me do French too.”
“Your family was different. I remember them. I thought you were a really lucky guy.”
“Yeah.”
“All I wanted was to get out, my first agenda. Your family left for Israel, that was it, there wasn’t anyone I could talk to. I heard you went to America later. You didn’t know how much your family meant to me then. But I was a kid. You were what? Fifteen, sixteen?”
“Something like that.”
“I was thirteen years old. But I knew there was better than the big shit we called Communism. I knew because of you and your mother.”
“We were real assholes back then.”
“Not you,” Fallon said. He picked up the coffee when it came and smiled. “Not Artemy Ostalsky. You were my hero.”
“So where do you live now, in New York I mean?”
“Tribeca. You?”
“Broadway. Near White Street.”
“A couple of blocks from me. Great. You travel a lot, Artie?”
“Some. You?”
“Business stuff. New media. I got in early. I got out in time.”
“Smart.”
“Luck, mostly. I got in on the ground floor, bought, sold. Silly money. Put the cash away. Somewhere, Artie, I got lucky.”
“You were always smart.”
“I could fix stuff. But you were the rebel. You were the kid who knew about rock and roll and jazz. You knew everything about the West. You could speak English before anyone. You had a godfather who could travel and bought you records, didn’t you? You told me about Willis Connover’s jazz hour on ‘The Voice of America’. My father beat me so bad when he found me under the covers listening to it, I couldn’t sit down. I didn’t care. Remember outside GUM where there were older boys in big gaberdine raincoats with the collars turned up, like young old guys? And the terrible pubescent mustaches on their upper lips? And you could get some kind of disks off them, Chubby Checker singing ‘Let’s Twist Again’. Two rubles.” He paused for breath. “I’m sorry. I know. I talk too much. Sometimes I think my head is so jammed with junk, it will explode.”
He grinned. He had a stupendous recall for detail and one thing led to another, so as soon as he thought about Chubby Checker he was talking about dance crazes. I could hardly keep up.
“You always had shoes that matched,” he went on.
“Jesus, Joe, how can you remember all that shit?”
“You even made me Joe. You said Art was your Western name, and everyone thought this was the grooviest thing we ever heard. Anything that was West was, like, good. It was,” he sighed deeply, “good! Then you said we should all have a Western name. Remember? The Borises even fought over who would be Bobby. Anatoly, you remember this guy, you made him Nat, like Nat King Cole. I think there was a Yevgeny who became Gino. So I’m Joe Fallon. Are you OK? You seem distracted.”
I was thinking about Lily. “Yeah, sure, I’m sorry.”
He crushed out the cigarette he was smoking and pulled another one out of the pack. “I tried to quit.”
“Me too.”
“You want to eat something? Have some breakfast or brunch or something? I’m starving. I’ve been up since six this morning.” He hesitated. “It’s OK. You probably have stuff to do.”
“Let’s eat something.”
“Here?”
“Fine.”
While we ate bacon and eggs and croissants, people looked at Fallon. He was a handsome man; the dark hair fell over his forehead. Behind a pair of stylish glasses with tortoiseshell frames, his eyes were friendly.
After we ate, he tossed the cigarettes on the table and we settled in with more coffee and smoked a half pack between us. We reminisced like guys do, half emotional, half joking, catching up. I was glad it was daylight. I was glad I wasn’t alone. When I was alone and thought about Lily I was jumpy, febrile, nuts.
In 1978, Joe got out of Moscow. He spent a few months in Brighton Beach, earned some bucks, went to LA and got himself into college. He became an American citizen and went into the Air Force, where he had the run of the new computers just coming onto the market. By the time the PC thing was happening, he was on his way.
“Kids?”
He grinned. “Three.”
“Wife?”
“Two. First a Russian girl because I was lonely, she was lonely, we were students. Our boy is twenty-two, if you can believe. Billy.”
“Then?”
He flinched. “Her name was Dede. We had two kids. She was so great.”
“Was?”
“She died three years ago.”
“Christ. I’m sorry.”
“Cancer. They got it late. I wanted to kill the son-of-a-bitch doctor who told us she had cancer, but she said to me, ‘Darling, it’s not his fault.’”
“I’m sorry.”
&
nbsp; “I left Scarsdale when Dede died. Our daughter Lisa’s in her first year at Yale. Alex, he’s seventeen, he’s in prep school. I wanted him home, but it’s what he needed. Before they went away, I was a regular suburban daddy.”
“It sounds good.”
“I loved it. I’m kind of at loose ends. I travel a lot now. Hey, sorry. This is gloomy stuff. You want more coffee?”
“Two Russian guys in Paris, you got to have some kind of gloom, right?
“I don’t feel Russian.”
“Me either. I never did.”
“I killed myself getting rid of the accent. When I heard my accent, it was like a bad smell, I wanted to be American.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?” He looked grateful.
I nodded.
“When Gorbachev got in and things changed, I realized there was this huge country and nothing in it and everybody wants something. I held off. I wouldn’t do business with them, you know. For ages. Dede said this is nuts, I’ll go with you. She even learned Russian. And I saw Russia through her eyes and it looked better. Sort of better. She could be in Moscow and look at the churches, the pictures, the museums, the subways, she could think about Chekhov, she could enjoy the Bolshoi. She made friends there. She made it OK for me again.” He put his hand on my arm. “So what happened to you?”
“We left Moscow, we went to Israel. After the army, I beat it to New York. I became a cop. I liked it. I do private stuff now.”
“You’re married? Kids?”
“Not married.”
“Happy, though?”
“I was.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
He saw I was restless. He said, “I should let you go,” and reached for the check.
I wanted to say: don’t go. I wanted to tell him about Lily, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell him because there was no point and I didn’t really know him, didn’t know what casual conversation he might have with someone who would talk too much. I had no leads on Lily’s case. After twenty years on the job, even though I had quit the department, I was still a cop. I kept my mouth shut.
Skin Trade Page 5
