The building was unoccupied except for Tolya and a couple of others, he said. But uniformed flunkies manned the doors and operated the elevators. The place smelled of wet cement and plaster dust. Everywhere the painters’ dropcloths fluttered on your feet, in your face, like ghosts.
On the top floor, the elevator opened into the penthouse. “Real Estate, Artyom. It’s the only thing that’s any good, you know? Here, Moscow, London, Havana.”
“I thought the Hong Kong market collapsed.”
Tolya found a bottle of brandy he’d left out on top of a packing crate, poured some and handed me a glass. “I bought Hong Kong, I sold Hong Kong. A few overpriced apartments in Hong Kong, the stock market cracks up, remember October 97? You have to play with it. Remember my father? He bored us to death talking about the land. I thought all you needed was love and a bass guitar, but he was right. This,” he said, sweeping his huge arms out to embrace the apartment, and maybe the entire city, “this is my piece of land.”
He pushed a button and the room lit up. It was a large room with curved floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. The river, the city, the skyline, the buildings all seemed present inside the room. It was a virtual city, a hyper-real New York floating on bright blue sky.
We went out on the wraparound terrace, where there was a high-power telescope. I peered in it: you could see the whole city. To one side was the building with the staircase to nowhere; in front was the Middlemarch, the townhouses, riverfront, the river, burned silver by the sun.
Tolya followed my glance. He looked down at the Middlemarch and said, “Ah, yes, the old asleep in the shadow of the future.”
“You’re a poet, man.”
He grinned. “Thank you.”
We went back inside and Tolya showed me his newest toy. “Custom-made Monopoly set,” he said. “Look.”
I looked. The set sat on a couple of packing crates in the middle of the empty room. The board was polished slivers of dark and pale wood. The pieces were gold and silver, the houses and hotels tiny but exact models. Tolya scooped up some Monopoly money in his hand and I saw it consisted of gold Krugerrands.
“My property.” Tolya picked up a house and popped open the roof. “Everything to scale. Look, furniture, people, everything. Eighteen karat. I buy something, I have a building made for Monopoly set.”
I thought about the lousy thugs who worked my place over. I wasn’t in the mood for Tolya’s games, but I humored him. I never knew exactly what Sverdloff’s business was. He bought real estate, but I knew he’d done errands for Sonny Lippert in the past. He was a Russian intellectual, arrogant, funny, nuts. People like the Sverdloffs were the actors and musicians and writers who gave the fucking Soviet Union some shine, wrote its poetry, made it sing, and occupied its jails.
Tolya had been a rock-and-roll star in the former Soviet Union for ten minutes once. He tried to hump his Fender Stratocaster on stage, then went to jail for it. He also spoke great English and fluent Chinese; he made his name on radio broadcasting Russian rock music to the Chinese and got away with it because no one knew what the hell he was talking about. It was the early Eighties. I was already long gone. I never met him until later, but I had heard.
After the Commies went, Tolya’s father gave him a piece of land outside Moscow; he discovered he was a natural-born capitalist.
“Parents OK?” I said.
He nodded. “Yes, fine. You remember?”
I remembered: it was fall then too, in Nikolina Gora outside Moscow. And beautiful – the white birch trees, the skidding yellow moon. We sat on the porch of the Sverdloff dacha, me and his cousin Svetlana.
I looked away from Tolya now and lit a cigarette. I almost married Svetlana, until she was blown up in a car bomb meant for me. She had on a white T-shirt and white jeans and a red shawl that night. Gold hoops in her ears. I remembered.
“Little Tolya?” Tolya Sverdloff’s father was a famous actor; his son, Tolya III, was already a Moscow teen idol.
“He’s got lead role in a big soap,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Tolya’s mood changed. Mostly he talks about his kids all night long if you ask. Now he was curt, evasive, uneasy.
I said, “Then let’s talk about Ulanova, your Russian auntie. You have anything besides this brandy to drink?”
There was a half-finished bar in one corner. Tolya found a bottle of Absolut and a couple of glasses. He filled one and handed it to me. We sat on the packing crates.
“What’s going on, Tol?”
“I tried to call you as soon as the Pascoe thing broke.”
“Yeah, I got a message, I was busy. So how come you were calling me about some old woman whose apartment you wanted? How’s that?”
“I figured when Pascoe died and there’s a Russian speaker involved, Sonny Lippert gets called, Sonny calls you. I have an interest. You want to talk?”
I talked. Thomas Pascoe in the Middlemarch pool. The building itself. The Pascoe co-op board, the rejects like Jane Cabot, who wanted an apartment bad enough to kill, and Lulu Fine, who didn’t. Then I said, “So maybe it was a handyman.”
“Artyom, please!”
“OK. Then who?”
“Your Mrs Pascoe?”
“I don’t think so. She’s not mine.”
He smiled. “But you like this lady, Artyom? More than you should like her? How’s Lily?”
“Mind your own fucking business. What do you know about Pascoe?”
“His bank bought big, London, Russia. Twenty years ago he was in and out of Moscow. Errands for the British. The Americans. Old-time spook stuff, but who gives a shit? Recently he was in on the oil in Baku. Mostly his people buy real estate. London mostly. My bank also buys. Small world.”
“Your bank? I thought most of the banks went bust when the rouble got devalued.”
“I’m smarter than most.”
“Do me a favor. Take possession of Ulanova’s apartment.”
“You want me to plant a little bomb, flush out the opposition, meet with the co-op board?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Someone tried to beat me up. Inside the Middlemarch. Someone with a Russian accent and a crude style.”
“What happened?”
“I hit him over the head instead.”
“So now some hood’s even more pissed off at you.”
“Enough to fuck with my apartment and leave a picture of me with the eyes cut out.”
We talked, he drank, I drank. He left the room and came back with a satin bathrobe over his shoulders. He tugged the lapel. “Belongs to George Foreman once. From Rumble in the Jungle. I bought at Christie’s auction,” he said, then he took a Montecristo a foot long out of a box on the floor, slipped off his diamond-studded platinum Rolex, tossed it down. Tolya showed me his toys, he bragged and laughed like he always did, but it was an imitation. There was no gusto. The act was thin. There was something wrong.
The phone rang, he picked up his cellphone and went out on to the terrace to take the call. I got up and looked for a bathroom.
It was black marble. There was a dressing room next to it, and idly I looked inside Tolya’s closets. His wardrobe was big: cashmere jackets, dozens of suits, the stacks of silk shirts and sweaters, the racks of identical Gucci loafers in twenty colors and a dozen skin types – red, green, purple, black, ostrich, alligator, elephant, all with solid gold buckles. Through a hidden speaker system, Sinatra sang.
A few minutes later Tolya Sverdloff appeared. He whistled along with Frank, “South of the border, down Mexico way,” and gestured at the dressing room. “You like it?”
“Sure I like it.”
“Let me show you something,” he said, opened a door, showed me a small steel plaque with a green key pad, then punched the buttons.
There was the sound of a motor. Bolts snapped into place. The door between the dressing room and the bedroom slammed shut. A small screen slid out of the ceiling. I looked up. It was closed-circuit
TV; I saw the kitchen, then the living room. Tolya followed my gaze. He had his glass in one hand.
“What the fuck is this?” I said.
“This is my Just-In-Case Room. My Perhaps Room. You remember before, old times, bad times, everyone in Moscow had the Perhaps Bag?”
I remembered the old women with string bags wound around their hands. Soldiers with cardboard suitcases. Canvas sacks on wheels the old men dragged across the dirty snow. Everyone had a Perhaps Bag. Perhaps you might see toilet paper on sale, perhaps oranges. You would need a bag to take it home.
My mother made me carry a string bag and it embarrassed the hell out of me, but I managed to stuff it in the pants pocket of my school uniform. I never carry a bag home now. Lily thinks I’m nuts, but I’ll give a kid five bucks to carry my stuff two blocks.
“So?”
“This is my Perhaps Room.”
“Perhaps what, for chrissake?” I was laughing, but I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. We were trapped in a room with steel walls. “OK, nice joke,” I said. I’m not good in shut-up spaces and he knows it. Tolya knows. “Very funny, Tolya. So open the doors.”
Instead, Tolya punched a code in the wall plaque. A siren wailed. He turned it off. He showed me how the bullet-resistant walls were embedded in the wood. There was a short-wave radio. In the bathroom was a refrigerator filled with mineral water, canned goods and space food; there was an oxygen tank and a prescription safe stocked with antibiotics, sleeping pills, valium. There was a locked box behind the shirts that contained a dozen weapons. Another contained cash. He removed a semi from the weapons box.
“Perhaps what?” I said again.
“Perhaps terrorists show up, perhaps radiological spills, perhaps biological or a bomb or the bad guys.” Tolya polished off his drink. “I am a businessman. People get crazy.” He went on with his list: “Disgruntled employees, angry women. Riots, earthquakes, blackouts, floods.”
I snorted, “Earthquakes? In New York City? How about plagues of frogs?”
“Also frogs. Look, Artyom, my favorite,” he said, and demonstrated the high-voltage cattle-prod technology underneath the carpet outside the dressing room. Under siege in his dressing room, he could activate the cattle-prod welcome mat; this would produce a violent kick, a nasty surprise for anyone who got past the front door. And the door was four inches of reinforced steel.
Tolya was laughing. I was sweating. What I felt the night in the stairwell at the Middlemarch, I felt again: the claustrophobia enveloped me.
He laughed some more. “‘Forting up,’ they are calling this. Everyone has one. Not on blueprints. Installed the last minute of design.”
I kept it light. “You’re nuts, man. Certifiable.”
“It is dangerous out there.”
“I’d rather have a dog. Can we get out of here now?”
“Sure,” he said, but he didn’t move.
“What is it?”
Tolya said, “I’ll do this thing you want, take over the old woman’s apartment, OK, but be careful.”
“What of ?”
“I called you Monday to warn you off this whole Pascoe thing, you understand? The thugs who went for you. It was a warning.”
“I got that. Of course I did. Jesus.”
“Maybe not a warning for you.”
“What?”
“For me.”
Press the button, I thought. Press the goddamn button!
I watched Tolya carefully. I’m big enough, but he towered over me. He was the color of uncooked meat. He didn’t smile. We were locked in a room with steel walls. My stomach churned. I had seen a room like this somewhere else.
I said, “Open the fucking doors.”
Tolya looked at me. “Don’t be naïve, Artyom. You make a mistake here. You think because I am your friend, that I am like you, a law-abiding good little comrade,” he said. “I am a free agent, faithful only to my bank account.”
“And your friends.”
He grimaced. “Sometimes also my friends.”
A reporter in a bad linen jacket had stopped Frankie Pascoe a few yards from her front door. He was gesturing to a guy with a camera. I pushed him away. Signalled to a uniform on the beat nearby.
“Thank you,” Frankie said. “I’m going home now.”
I kept pace with her up to the door, then she stopped. “I said thanks.”
“Tell me something, Frankie.”
“I must go inside.”
I put my hand on her arm. “No. Not until you tell me how come I think you’ve got a steel-clad fort in the middle of your apartment in New York City. With a button in your dressing room and closed-circuit TV. Your building has security. It has a doorman. You’ve got a whole precinct ready to jump through hoops if you need them.”
“It didn’t actually do us any good, did it?” She looked towards the Middlemarch as if she were expecting someone, then back at me. “You’re absolutely right. I have got one. It was Tommy’s idea. It made him feel important. He said he was always in some kind of danger, because of the work he’d done.”
“That’s it? He was some kind of spy?”
She let out a raucous laugh. “He liked to think so. He was only a banker, but he knew the Kennedys and Harriman and Kissinger, he knew the Soviets, the British. They let him run errands. He was very charming. The wives liked him. The husbands used to lock up their women, so to speak, when they heard Tommy was in town. He had them all.” The wind off the river ruffled her hair. “I used to adore it when my politics irritated him. Fancied myself a radical. Kill the pigs, remember? Long time ago.” She hummed “Where have all the flowers gone?” and walked towards the front door. “You must be the only cop in New York City who knows what in the fuck I am talking about. I said Cold War to someone recently, he didn’t know what it was. Cold War Scrap, Tommy called himself.”
“I’m not a cop anymore.”
She looked up, saw the camera crew on its way back in her direction, hastily stubbed out her smoke and said, “Christ, I really am sorry, Artie, but I must go.”
“Just fucking tell me.”
“The safe room made Tommy feel a big man.”
12
It was another glamorous evening, sun falling into the river like a neon orange, as I drove out to Brighton Beach. I took the Belt out through Brooklyn towards the ocean. Sky and water slid by the car window and in the late afternoon light the harbor seemed as pristine as it must have looked when Giovanni da Verazzano had arrived for the first time; the Indians who met him, they say, were pretty dazzling: a fast-talking race with all colors of feather.
I went to Brooklyn to see a guy in security, maybe get a handle on Sverdloff. There was some way that Tolya Sverdloff was jammed up. And there were Russians on Sutton Place. Lulu Fine was running a virtual department store for Russians – oil paintings, furniture, women, she could fix anything. And Sverdloff himself had moved into the building next door.
On Brighton Beach Avenue I parked near a shop that sold Halloween masks. Yeltsin, Gorby, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin with fangs and a mouthful of blood. You couldn’t pick a better bunch for Halloween than the Russkis, the way I saw it; you didn’t need make-believe.
But even Brighton Beach looked good in this weather, even the Russians were delirious as they strolled in the sun. Fifteen miles from Frankie Pascoe’s rarefied backwater on the East River, it was a foreign planet. The duplicity of her world, the cold, dry propriety, its restrictions and ambitions, the skein of lies, the sense of entitlement gave me the cosmic creeps. Someone went after Thomas Pascoe and killed him and there were still no answers.
I passed a laundromat and the jingle of slots caught my attention. I put my head in the door. It smelled of clean wash and small change. The neon on the slot machines glittered. Women, heavyset babushkas, lumbered between the dryers and the slots, sharing their quarters between necessity and hope.
I’d come to see Johnny Farone, but Farone was busy so I went to the beach to kill some time.
Along the Atlantic Ocean, Brighton Beach stretches from Sheepshead Bay to Coney Island, and tonight, because of the weather, crowds of people promenaded along the boardwalk, girls in threes and fours, arms linked, couples with kids, boys with rolled-gold chains and thick leather jackets, old men yakking through their beards. Some of the elderly, the old men and women on walkers, gabbing in Yiddish, were the last survivors of another age. Mostly it was Russian, the whispers, yells, catcalls, babies crying for supper, the noise of gossip as people trafficked in news and money, sex and snacks.
The dusky light took the edge off the hard blonde hair and brassy gold jewellery the women wore. The whiff of charcoal and burnt meat was sweet. The air was clear and turning cold. On the beach, the piroshki men heated meat pies over their little stoves. I bought one, went back up on the boardwalk, hooked my foot around the railing and watched the ocean for a while. I ate the pie; it tasted great.
“What’s so funny?” a good-looking woman called out in Russian, and I realized I was laughing out loud. At myself. I had spent twenty-five years, more than twenty-five, trying to dump the past; maybe I had become a Russian all over again. Three girls, arms linked, stopped and looked at me. I complimented them in Russian, then I went to see Johnny Farone, who once gave me a tip that helped me finally put a case together.
An Italian guy, Farone sold appliances for a while, then went into the security business, a smart move if you were dealing with Russians on Brighton Beach, where the motto was if you ain’t paranoid you ain’t paying attention.
For a while, Farone was practically the only non-Russian for a mile in either direction, and I first knew him when he worked out of Cosmos Auto Parts.
Cosmos was always a crummy shop, beige plastic crucifix on the wall that shook when the trains went by, espresso pot in the toilet, the window sills full of second-hand fanbelts and used air con parts. Johnny’s place burned down. He took the insurance, got smart and learned Russian. He got into security. He figured even Russians like Italian food once in a while and he bought a run-down place with a view of the beach and spruced it up; he hired a guy to make the pasta. He orders the mozzarella in fresh.
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