Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  His story held up. Gary spent the night at his father-in-law’s place, went there as soon as he left Lulu, stayed up late with the old man talking dyed baby lamb.

  Someone left a piece of her where it would be found. There was nothing I could do. Sverdloff didn’t answer his phone.

  A Russian creep wanted me off the case. Sverdloff was in trouble. Pascoe was a saint to the homeless, a lazy fuck to his wife. He willed away most of his dough. And now poor bloody Lulu Fine was dead. My goddamn fault. Lulu was nosing around for me. Help me out. Oh yeah, and I had slept with Frankie Pascoe and knew I’d do it again. As soon as I could.

  I pushed Sonny Lippert to one side. I told him about Lulu’s dealings with the Russians. “The way they did it, you figure it had to be some Russian shit. Keep your nose clean, lose your nose, they think it’s so fucking poetic.”

  “You think she got in trouble messing with the Nouveau Russkis, fixing up Russian hookers with rich guys?”

  “Hookers?”

  “Hookers, you know, Natashas, models, whatever. Tania from Tblisi who needs a pair of Prada sandals, what’s the difference?”

  I said, “No, I think she got in trouble nosing around the Pascoe thing if you’re asking.”

  “You want me to believe it was the Brighton Beach crowd killed Thomas Pascoe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sonny, who was wearing a double-breasted black suit and looked like an undertaker, said, “How deep in this are you, man?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “I should have pulled you off of it.”

  “It’s too fucking late. You figured you’d stick me in, see what stirs, isn’t that right, Sonny? You got me to babysit Frances Pascoe. I was a babysitter, wasn’t I? She didn’t do it.”

  Sonny looked at me hard. “You sleeping with her?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “It wasn’t dope,” Callie Rizzi said. She was sitting in my car when I got to it. “My mom told you it was dope, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I knew you were on the case up here. You weren’t home. I walked around. I saw your car. What difference does it make?”

  “So it wasn’t dope.”

  “I’m nervous, Artie, OK. They think I lie, you know? They think I make up stuff. So tell them it’s dope, OK? Kids experimenting, like Mom thinks,” she said. “I won’t bother you anymore, OK?”

  I caught her wrist. “What?”

  She whispered it very softly. “Kids at school.”

  She crossed her arms. “The guy in the pool. I mean, is it true? They hurt Mr Pascoe with a sword? I mean killed him.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I don’t know. Kids, we talk a lot of crap, you know?”

  “A kid could do it,” I heard myself say to Sonny. Remember the Ninja sword? It could have been a kid.

  “You have to give me names.”

  “I can’t. I didn’t see. I don’t know. I only heard.”

  “You have to. This is real. Real people getting hurt.”

  She bit on her lip.

  I said, “Don’t do that, just tell me.” I turned the key. “You want to show me your school?”

  She shrugged. I pulled the car away from the curb and drove the few blocks north, then parked in front of St Peter’s. It was Saturday. The building was quiet, the Gothic façade scrubbed.

  I said, “Come on.”

  Callie said, “Let’s sit in the car a while.”

  Saturday morning. The streets were already filled with kids trying out their costumes. Some of them wore eight-inch platforms; you could see over the crowds in them; the kids called them Double Fours. Tourists had started arriving. Halloween was Sunday. I opened the window.

  “Artie?”

  “What, babe?”

  “They think, my mom especially, I’m a fourteen-year-old kid who’s deep but cute, that if I have secrets, it’s like stuff about boys, like that. They think I’m like in adolescence which is why I shut my door on them when they pester me. They don’t get it, they have me in their sights all the time so that I feel like someone has a pillow over my face, I feel like I might not wake up in the morning, and they think what they feel is love, but it isn’t. I wish I could have stayed in my own school in Brooklyn, but Mom wanted Manhattan. She wanted St Pete’s. She didn’t want me with the Guidos and Clydes, so now I’m with these rich kids, I have to fit in. That’s why I go to the park at night.” She opened the car door.

  “We’re on the bus, one girl goes, ‘I don’t know if I want to be a famous actress when I grow up or just a rich person.’ Or someone else, she screams out at some pathetic boy, ‘Hey, Davey, come over here and I’ll give you a handjob.’”

  “Jesus, Cal.”

  I locked the car and followed her to the school. A side door was open. She led me inside and down a flight of stairs to a locker room. Through a door I saw some boys were shooting hoops, the rhythmic thud of the ball constant, irritating, unnerving in the cavernous weekend quiet. From somewhere I heard kids shouting, their voices echoing back with the kind of metallic ring you get in a swimming pool. Then a splash. There was a pool near by.

  Callie sat on a bench and I sat next to her. “My parents, they love me. OK. Like I loved the dog, I can’t even like remember its name now, but we never let it do dog things and, personally, I think that dog died from love. So at night, when they’re like snoring, I go out. I have to. I can’t breathe at home. They think it’s sex or drugs. I’m just bored.”

  “Who do you go with, Cal?”

  “Can I have some coffee?”

  “Sure. Later.”

  She got up and wandered down the row of lockers, banged the doors open and shut, lolled against a door. Then, no warning, nothing, she began to cry. “I need some help.”

  “I’m here.”

  Absently, she started pulling at the lockers. Most of them were locked. A few opened and she peered inside. “Stuff is like happening and I don’t understand.”

  “Boy stuff ? Guys bugging you?”

  “Please! No, Artie. No. Not like that. I just said.”

  “Not drugs.”

  “Worse.”

  “How worse?”

  “You won’t tell Mom, will you? Or any of them, you have to like promise me. I hate this fucking school, you know.”

  “I’ll talk to Mike. There’s no reason you have to do anything you don’t want.”

  She tried to laugh, “In your dreams,” she said, wiped her face, then went on looking in lockers.

  “You looking for something, sweetheart?”

  Callie turned around. “They talk about killing, Artie. They talk about death. They read out stuff from weird books.” She looked at the lockers, the concrete floor, then at me. I’ve never seen such fear. “They call the park the Killing Ground. They talk about ritual killing. Rites of passage, they say. They buy weapon catalogues in Chinatown. They practice decapitating chickens, like someone got their dad to buy some and they keep the chickens in a chicken coop in a penthouse on Central Park West, the San Remo, one of those buildings.” She was crying, but now she giggled, and I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh.

  I said, both of us laughing so hard she had to sit down, “You think the co-op board knows?”

  “I know, it’s insane.” Callie held my arm. Then she wiped her face. “I have to go now. I’ll be late.”

  “Who’s involved?”

  “I only hear it second hand. No one uses real names. They use names from books. They mean it. They’re serious.”

  “Do you think they killed Thomas Pascoe? Callie? Tell me for chrissake. If they did, it’s trouble, you, me, everyone. They fucked with my loft. Did you know that? People are dead.”

  She just folded her arms across her chest and said, “I don’t know. Don’t ask me anymore.”

  “Is Mishkin involved, and his pals?”

  She looked offended. “Of course not. It’s Jared who told me abo
ut it, he said he knew you were a friend and a cop, he was worried. He’s not like that. He works most nights in the shelter.”

  She was a volatile kid and scared to death; now she turned belligerent. “Anyhow, it’s your fault. Your fucking fault.”

  “Don’t swear like that.”

  “Don’t come on like my parents. You curse like crazy all the time.”

  My stomach turned. “What’s my fault, honey? What?”

  “You dragged me into this, you did. I only asked Jared about Mr Pascoe ’cause you wanted me to.”

  Callie was sullen and unforgiving when I dropped her home later that day. What she told me shook me up plenty. The kids all lied, Angie said. I didn’t believe that.

  As I pulled up to my building, I was suddenly fed up with the good weather. It had gone on too long. I wanted rain. In the parks, the leaves underfoot were so dry they crunched like potato chips, and upstate, forest fires had begun eating the land. After the endless Indian summer, the palmy days would end, pundits said. Boom before the bust, they said, but the mayor went on TV a lot, proclaimed New York the greatest, danced like Ali in the ring, tried to crack jokes and lost more hair.

  The Pascoe case lost its juice. Lulu Fine’s murder sucked the charm out of the story; two murders in a week made people edgy.

  Halloween started that night. By Saturday night, a million people, maybe two, no one knew, were moving into town. The tunnels were choked. There was gridlock on the roads, in the streets. People spilled out of bars and restaurants on to the pavement, already in costume a night early, and every window glittered with grinning pumpkins. A fancy food store down by me sold life-size skeletons made out of white chocolate.

  Two of my old captains left messages on my machine to see if I could do a shift; I said I was already committed. I told Sonny Lippert I’d cover Sutton Place for him. It was rumored the President would attend a few of the parties. Security was a nightmare. West Coast gangs, the Crips and Bloods who had branches in Rockaway, were coming into Manhattan for initiation rites, someone said. If a witch slipped a box cutter out of his pocket and cut out the eye of a ghost, who was going to know? Who would see?

  More cops were called in from the suburbs. Parties were scheduled on practically every block, in every club, in all the parks. Platforms went up; bands tested their equipment. You could hear the loudspeakers all over town.

  For one night each year, every overlapping and separate group in New York City, Russian, Dominican, Indian, rich, poor, lawyers, bartenders, kids, was bent on the same thing, to celebrate the dead.

  The parade route was changed three times. Lippert ground his teeth and called me on the hour. I tried to reach Frankie Pascoe; the maid said she was sleeping. I wanted to see her. I wanted her.

  “I wish I was home.” Lily sounded mournful on the phone. “I’m missing everything.”

  “So come home then. You could get a plane tonight, be home in time for Halloween, you and Beth. We’ll go on the roof. We’ll have a party.”

  “I can’t do that,” Lily said. But it was getting cold in London. She needed some things for Beth. Could I go by her place, Fedex some things?

  Sure, I said. Sure. Lily was staying on, but I didn’t have much right to say anything when I’d spent the night before with Frankie Pascoe, when I wanted to do it again and would if she let me.

  Lily asked, “Everything OK?”

  “Fine.”

  We made small talk. When I got off the phone, I realized she never asked about the case.

  “Sympathy for the Devil” was blasting out of Rick’s stereo when I went upstairs that night and found him in his underpants looking at costumes that were heaped on the floor, on the sofas, strewn over the green marble kitchen counter.

  “You’re planning a party?”

  “Several. Your friend Sverdloff’s giving a party. Didn’t he tell you? He called. Said for me to stop by if I got bored with the teabags.”

  “He called? He’s OK.” I felt a knot in my gut untie itself.

  “I said that he called. He left a message for you. He’s giving a party. You all right?” Rick peered at me.

  “Yeah. How come he didn’t call me?”

  “How the hell should I know? Art? You with me? What are you going as?” He held a ruffled shirt against himself. “I don’t know about this Anglo crap.”

  “Fuck that shit, Rick, I’m not going as anything. What Anglo crap?”

  “Janey Cabot’s giving a big bash. You know what she wants? We’re all supposed to dress up as famous Brits, you know? Otherwise she might withhold her approval, that’s how they say it.” Rick mimicked. “Withhold her approval, oh dear, yata, yata.”

  “You could always go as the Queen.”

  “Fuck off, man.”

  The doors to the terrace were open, a mild breeze rustled the orchids. Rick punched the CD and Sid Vicious came on singing “My Way”.

  “What is this, the Halloween hit parade?” I was edgy.

  Rick said, “Seriously, you OK, Art?”

  “Yeah.”

  He selected a shimmery blue robe thing from a pile, ran into the bedroom. I found a beer and sat on a barstool, picked up the phone and tried Frankie, then wondered what the hell I was doing.

  Ricky reappeared in the long Chinese gown, a little cap on his head, a pigtail hanging down his back. I glanced at the sepia photographs on his wall, then back at Rick. He had transformed himself into one of his own ancestors. Then he burst out laughing. “What? You think I look like a waiter in Chinatown. Who were you calling?”

  “No one.”

  “So, Artie, I got the perfect idea for your outfit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You could go as a cop.”

  16

  Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, blood on their clothes, danced on the roof of a Sutton Place townhouse that night, and there was John Lennon with a bloody shirt and a hole in his heart; Kenneth Starr carried Bill Clinton’s head. Sutton Place was closed to traffic. It was the warmest night of the fall, sultry almost. Everywhere on Sutton Place, in the gardens, on the roofs, in the street, people partied.

  I was looking out through the lens of the telescope mounted on the ledge of Sverdloff’s terrace. I could see everything: A jaunty department flag hung over the back of the police boat, blue markings clear, that bobbed at the end of the Middlemarch jetty; a cop in uniform reached over the back of the boat and trailed his hand in the water, and then looked up and waved at a flotilla of boats that chugged up the East River and were caught in the arc lights rigged on the Drive and on the bridge. Green and yellow water taxis, tugs, ferryboats, a Circle Line loaded with people cruised past. It was like a movie set, the night all lit up.

  I swivelled the scope: the streets were lit by more lights. The parade that had wound its way up from Sixth and Spring earlier had splintered when it left the Village, turned East, then kept on going. Ten thousand cops patrolled the streets, in uniform, on scooters and bikes, on horseback, on foot. Bands played everywhere, salsa, reggae, rap groups. A jazz orchestra on a flatbed truck wove its way up First Avenue. I could see the glint of light on the brass.

  From the terrace I shifted the telescope so I could see the building tops, lighted up in orange and black. All over the city a million people bobbed and swayed. I looked down at Sutton Place again and for a second I thought I saw, on the little piazza at the Middlemarch, a figure among the stone urns with white flowers in them. Frankie Pascoe smoking a cigarette. But it wasn’t her. She didn’t answer my calls all day.

  Suddenly, Sverdloff’s building seemed to vibrate as the fireworks exploded. The crowd on his terrace pushed for places at the railing, then whistled, clapped, cheered, yelled, as gold fountains of light fell into the river. I put the telescope down.

  Torches wrapped with yellow flame shivered in the breeze on Tolya’s terrace; waiters snaked between the guests and hefted heavy trays of Champagne. I caught my reflection in the glass wall. In uniform, my reflection stared back, a
version of the guy on my old ID card, only older. Dark blue jacket. My old cap. Light blue shirt. One of ten thousand guys in uniform that night.

  “I like the outfit.” Tolya came outside and stood next to me. He wore white tie and tails and said he was dressed as Fred Astaire. He put a cold glass of Champagne into my hand and said, “Take a drink.”

  He was the good host, smiling, laughing, pushing drinks on people, feeding titbits into the mouths of the hundred gorgeous women he’d invited, but I knew him and he was worried. Tolya looked through the window and across the room. A man got up like an Orthodox priest danced with Catherine the Great. I saw Tolya look at him, then turn away.

  “Who is he, Tol?”

  “His name’s Eddie Kievsky,” Tolya said.

  “From Brighton Beach?”

  “No.”

  “From?”

  “London. He owns a big piece of the action over there.”

  I went inside, where a band played and people danced. I saw Callie Rizzi – I got her the invite — and she waved. The invitation had redeemed me. She had on a micro-miniskirt and a Soviet army shirt and cap I got for her. She was dancing with Jared Mishkin and he looked up and smiled too; he was got up as some kind of nineteenth-century gent, black frock coat, ruffled shirt. He was handsome as hell. She glowed; he smiled sweetly.

  I started towards Callie and felt a hand on my arm. It was Rick. I pulled away from him and moved towards Callie. He stopped me. “No,” he said. “Leave her.”

  In the dining room, people bobbed for apples. Water splashed on the floor. I figured I better go down to the street; I left Tolya’s before midnight.

  In the unfinished lobby, where the furniture was draped with dust sheets, someone had placed a pair of pumpkins on the floor: Jack and Jackie O’Lantern. Six naked guys on their way in said they were the Full Monty. A frantic Spice Girl – Back From the Dead Spice, she told me – waited for the elevator.