Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  The driver turned his head, muttered, “Bishop’s Avenue, you said, right?” and pulled up to the fancy wrought-iron gate.

  I pushed a buzzer. Heard a voice. Gave Tolya Sverdloff’s name and my own. The gate swung open. We drove up a circular gravel drive that could accommodate a tank division. It was lined with dripping topiaries in the shape of animals, and we stopped at a massive fieldstone house with white columns out front. There was a big piece of land around it. The trees were bare, gray-green, dripping, the vista huge but bleak.

  I paid the driver, asked him to wait. He lifted his shoulders in apology, glanced around, seemed uneasy, but all he said was he was due home. He handed me a printed card with the phone number of a cab company.

  The door was already open. Through it I saw a hallway, warm yellow light, parquet floors, half an acre of marble.

  The maid was Russian; she tried speaking English and I let her. She led me through the hall, where there was a carved fireplace twelve feet high, and into a living room that was lit up like Christmas and decorated with brocade sofas and chairs, antique tables, oil paintings. Some of the pictures were famous.

  A skinny guy with blond hair and pale oily skin put down his newspaper – the Financial Times – got up from his chair and offered his hand. “Eduard Kievsky,” he said, then smiled. “Eddie.”

  I recognized Kievsky from Tolya’s Halloween party; he had been got up as a priest. Now Kievsky wore a good gray suit and handmade wing-tips. I don’t know if he recognized me but he didn’t say. I figured him for Ukrainian. He spoke bad English and educated Russian. “We are all at breakfast,” he said politely. “Please join us.”

  He led me into the dining room where seven or eight people sat at a long mahogany table, chatting and eating. The women, most of them in their thirties, sat one end of the table; they were all cheekbones and collagen. They were dressed in fancy sports clothes – Gucci, Hermès – and their Chanel bags were on the table next to them. Picking at pastries with manicured fingers, they leaned in towards each other and chattered softly: Manolo, Versace, Donna Karan, I caught the words and figured London was as overheated by consumption as New York.

  Kievsky took me around the table; everyone shook my hand and greeted me in English as if they’d learned how in etiquette class. Somewhere, a stereo played classical music, Mozart probably.

  Finally, Kievsky introduced his wife Irina, who wore jewellery the size of fruit and a couple of inches of leather skirt. She held out her hand and said, “Look what Eddie has bought. Look how beautiful.”

  It was a gold egg the size of a plum, painted like a circus tent in bright enamels and studded with tiny jewels. Irina pushed an invisible mechanism and the top popped open to reveal a tiny jewelled clown on a unicycle in a circus ring. She fiddled with the mechanism and the clown went around and around on the bike, jewels glittering, enamels catching the light.

  Reverent, Kievsky and his wife gazed at the little egg and the rest of the crowd gathered around him to admire it. He whispered, “The real thing. Fabergé. Exquisite.” He looked up. “Hello, darling.” Kievsky reached out his arm for a girl of maybe fourteen who appeared from another room. It was his daughter.

  I asked the girl her name. She said her English name was Aspree. She wore riding clothes, spoke perfect English, British accent. She babbled about horses and school and her sorrow about the Spice Girls, that she was sad they were over, but, well, there was other cool stuff.

  She was already a regular little courtesan and she escorted me to the sideboard, held out a plate, lifted up the covers from various hot dishes and offered to serve me. Bacon, eggs, sausages, steaks, pancakes, also caviar, cheese, smoked fish. I was hungry. I took the loaded plate and sat next to her while Kievsky disappeared to take a call.

  While I ate, I listened. The group at the table, two Russians, an English guy, the women, talked about golf and racehorses. They chattered about real estate, country cottages in France, villas in Italy, property in London. A few years earlier this crowd had been second-rate Communist Party hacks or their suppliers, the men – and sometimes women – who provisioned the system. The move into real money had been natural. But the money came fast and then they yearned for the style, the big houses, the clothes. In London, it looked to me, you could find your way to a make-believe past; in London, your aristocratic fantasies could all come true.

  You could treat London as your alternative home if you were a Moscow hood. You could be home in Moscow or Kiev in three and a half hours if you got homesick. You could hop over to New York. For the rising Moscow gangster, moving up meant London’s high ground literally. Aspree told me about their vacation in Petersburg where they rented a whole palace and had servants who dressed up in old-time outfits to wait on them, she said.

  Kievsky returned and apologized. He gestured for me to follow and we went into a huge book-lined study. The furniture was fancy inlaid stuff and the chairs were green leather with brass studs, like in Johnny Farone’s restaurant in Brooklyn. A maid brought a tray with coffee and we made small talk now, about people I didn’t know in New York and Moscow, and about Sverdloff. On the wall were plaques from various charities testifying to the good works of Eduard and Irina Kievsky.

  Rain beat on the windows. Kievsky invited me to dinner. A standing invitation. A party the following week. A weekend to his country place to shoot birds.

  I was itching to get a move on, but playing his game was like courting a high-class hooker you wanted on the cheap; you had to talk the talk. We exchanged views on the Russian Partners Fund at Paine Webber, the art market, the rouble meltdown and other investment possibilities. He switched to Russian. It was his way of asking if I was one of them; I answered in the lingo.

  “Is there anything you need then, Artemy Maximovich?”

  I felt a chill. The weather, the house, the company, my own need for Kievsky and his supplies. Yes, I said to him. We understood each other.

  “Please.” He stood up and unlocked an old walnut breakfront. Kievsky put the little key back in his pocket and smiled. “We worry about the children.”

  In the breakfront was a dazzling array of weapons: handguns, pistols, semis. Kievsky let me know he could get me anything I needed, an AK or a complete missile, build your own, ready to go, armed. “Big, small, what you like,” he smiled. Even nukes could be had for a price.

  I selected a Gluck, he glanced at it, then picked up a phone and put the gun back into the display case. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kievsky’s ring. He had small, slim, pale hands and the ring was heavy on his pinkie finger.

  It was square, the gold work real fancy, and in the middle was a dark brown cat’s eye that shivered with light. It gave me the creeps. He saw me looking and said, “You admire my ring?” and I said, “Yeah, Yeah, it’s great.” He said, “I got it in Thailand. It was specially made for me. It’s one of a kind.” He was pleased. I didn’t tell him I knew a guy who worked a case over there on those cat’s eyes.

  They irradiate them a million times normal at the gem plants to make the eyes darker and more lustrous and a lot more expensive, and then the ring eats you up. One guy who died of cancer was nuked by his own ring.

  Kievsky asked again if I needed anything else. A few minutes later the maid reappeared carrying a leather briefcase and handed it to Kievsky.

  “Everything is here,” he said and gave me the soft leather case. Inside was a brand-new Gluck, plenty of ammo. He held it out. “Please.” I examined the gun; there was no serial number. I thanked him. I offered to pay and he looked injured. A favor is a favor, he said. Any friend of Sverdloff’s.

  He walked me to the door. “Please come again,” he said formally. His hand was soft and cold and the big ring on his little finger grazed mine.

  We stood on the steps. Carrying a package wrapped in crisp brown paper and tied with string, Irina joined him. In the daylight, she was even more stunning, taller than Eddie, dark-haired, eyes slightly slanted and very blue. She smiled at me and handed Eddie
the package. “Books,” she said in English. “The postman just comes.”

  Irina Kievskaya told me they were reading a lot of books and that she was just back from a week at Philanthropist College.

  “Very philosophical,” she said. “We read Aristotle and Dr Martin Luther King, and study best charities. We learn how to give.” Irina added, “We study poor persons.”

  I kept a straight face. “Very nice,” I said.

  She said, “Please do come again. Our daughter enjoyed your visit.”

  A dark-blue Jaguar was in the driveway. The driver in a peaked hat jumped out and held the door for me. My taxi was long gone, I was in the middle of nowhere on a hill, I didn’t have much choice. I wasn’t crazy about the car, though; it meant Kievsky had a handle on my movements.

  I got in and looked back at the house, where Kievsky and his wife still stood on the steps. She smiled and I realized Irina looked like someone I knew. It was eerie: I couldn’t call the right face up. I wasn’t even sure where I’d seen the face, but I had seen her face, or someone who was a dead ringer for her.

  20

  Perfidious Albion, anybody’s for a buck.

  It was what my father always said. I was in the car leaving Kievsky’s. I was looking at the crumpled picture of myself I’d ripped off the dummy. They say you pass forty, you get your father’s face, and I thought how much, in the photograph, I resembled my own father. His face came into my mind very clear suddenly, young, blue-eyed, confident. He was always a young father.

  Perfidious Albion. When he said it, he meant Geoffrey Gilchrist. “The English make good spies, Artyom, but they always sell out, they have no ideology, they belong to no one. If you ever go to England, you’ll understand,” and I’d laugh because the idea I’d ever go to England was so funny. I was going to America.

  Years go by, I don’t think about Gilchrist, then it jumps in my head and sticks, like the tune from a bad jingle. Geoff was the first Englishman I ever knew. I knew him in Moscow when my father, a young KGB officer then, had been one of his babysitters. Thirty years ago. I wondered if Gilchrist was still alive.

  It was the books that made me remember. The package in Irina Kievskaya’s hand wrapped in fresh brown paper. The books were what I remembered, books that came from London for Geoffrey Gilchrist wrapped in the crisp, rich brown paper, addressed in beautiful handwriting. A stream of books, all brand new.

  I looked at my watch. I had time to kill while I worked out how to get a handle on Thomas Pascoe in London. I left New York in a hurry, some crazy impulse when I found the picture in Lily’s drawer. Now I was somewhere in the middle of this immense wet city. No leads. No real contacts.

  I yelled at the driver. “Stop, OK. Just pull up there by that hotel.”

  In the hotel lobby, I found a Yellow Pages, looked under books, recognized the name of the shop. I picked up a phone.

  An English voice answered, “Can I help you with something?”

  I was as offhand as I could manage. “You once had a customer named Gilchrist. Old friend of mine. A Moscow address. Thought I might send him a book. Geoffrey Cole Gilchrist.”

  The phone line went silent for a few seconds.

  “I’m frightfully sorry,” the brisk voice said. “But I can’t think of anyone with that name.”

  I knew he was lying. I knew Gilchrist was alive.

  I said, “Is he still in Moscow?”

  “Would you like to let me have your name?” the voice asked, but I’d put the phone back on the hook.

  Geoffrey Gilchrist was alive. Son of a bitch. The past stuck a hand out and grabbed hold of me. The old bastard had survived them all and the guy in the bookstore knew. He knew!

  Traffic was jammed up all the way down the hill from Kievsky’s and the hotel where I made the call. Half an hour later, the car pulled up in front of the bookstore, I put the gun in my pocket, placed the leather case on the back seat and got out.

  In the bow window of the shop were old-fashioned kids’ books. The door was unlocked.

  A thin, elegant man in half glasses and a good suit – I figured him for the owner – was expecting me. He smiled. “You telephoned earlier?”

  We made conversation. There were books stuffed in the shelves, floor to ceiling. Books on the floor itself, books in freestanding bookcases that spun around so you could read the titles. Round mahogany tables held more books.

  In Moscow, if you wanted good books you got them under the table. My Aunt Birdie knew people. An old woman in a cardigan sweater who smoked cheap Indian cigarettes was her best contact; she saved the good stuff for Birdie, secreted under the counter, behind the dreck that passed for popular fiction, and the approved classics, and the dusty tomes on Dialectical Materialism or whatever horseshit you need to pass exams. Hidden in these spaces were western paperback books. Here was where Birdie bought for me tattered copies of Fitzgerald and Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett and Catcher in the Rye.

  Gilchrist’s books were always new. They smelled of good paper and nice bindings. I remembered helping him unwrap them, how they crackled with possibility. This was the store they came from. Its name had been magical for me as a kid.

  On the table where the new books glistened in their bright pristine jackets, I spotted a biography of George Eliot. I held it up. “Could you send this to New York?”

  “Of course we can.”

  I gave him Sonny Lippert’s address. “Do you still wrap your books in brown paper?”

  The bookstore owner nodded slightly towards a door, and I saw it was ajar. Slowly it opened, someone pushing from the other side, there was a faint, hesitant shuffle and a man emerged, glanced in my direction, then turned away and slipped out of the front door. I grabbed some money out of my pocket, put it on the table for the book and followed him into the street.

  The rain came down now in thick gray sheets, and I followed him under a low archway into a narrow passage, past a store selling fruit and vegetables. He disappeared through the door of a Lebanese restaurant. It was still shut. Through the window, I saw a waiter with a mustache polishing glasses methodically.

  He shook hands with the waiter, who brought him a small cup and saucer, then he took off his coat and put it neatly over the back of a chair. He removed the soft tweed hat. He rubbed his hands together and sat down.

  I walked through the door. He looked at me.

  It wasn’t a mistake. The gray rain that sluiced down the little restaurant window, the huge foggy city that dwarfed you, it could have been Moscow; thirty years disappeared.

  “Hello, Artemy Maximovich,” he said in bad Russian. “You have your father’s face. Is he still alive?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “I heard that you were looking for me, I think. Do sit down.”

  “Comrade Geoff.” I pronounced it “Joff” like we always did; it was how we figured Americans said it and we liked showing off our knowledge of the American way of speaking.

  The waiter brought me a towel and I sat down and rubbed my hair dry, found some cigarettes in my pocket and lit one. The cosy restaurant surrounded me. The waiter brought me coffee and the thick sweet brew warmed me up.

  The old man looked at me. Sitting opposite him, I was plugged into a grid of memories so vivid I could smell them.

  I got to know Gilchrist because my father took me places I had no business. I was the only son, only kid. He wanted me with him.

  “Max,” my mother would say, “Maxim Stefanovich, he has to practice,” and she’d stand in the doorway, the violin held out, and we’d both smile at her and run for it. Rock stars and jazzmen, in my arrogant adolescent opinion, did not take classical violin lessons from fat Russian ladies like my teacher.

  In the late Sixties, when the oil still flowed, the afterglow from the Khrushchev years was still warm. Young stars like my father, KGB guys with a future, had some good times. They got the plum jobs; some of the juiciest were babysitting the British spies. My father, his best friend Gennadi Ustinov – I c
alled him Uncle Gennadi because they were like brothers – loved it.

  My father knew them all: Philby, Burgess, Vivian McFarland, and the lesser lights: Nigel Crowe, Iain Lamb, Alec Singleton. But Geoffrey Gilchrist was his favorite. The first Englishman I ever met.

  “You kept the cufflinks?”

  I still have them. One of the two or three things I still have from Moscow, cufflinks, a scarf from some English university so old and ratty it leaves balls of blue wool on my hands when I touch it. I don’t know why I keep it.

  It was in the back of my mind ever since I touched down in London and now I stared at the old man, who rolled a coffee cup between his hands as if the glass would warm them. The hands were yellow as wax paper and covered with brown spots the size and color of corroded pennies. The same gold ring he always wore was on his left pinkie. He put the cup down and held out one of his hands. It was warm from the cup.

  The waiter brought pastries.

  “Please, won’t you eat something?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Did you recognize me?” Gilchrist spoke Russian but with a lousy English accent. He was eager. I looked at the shape of the shoulders, still square, and the light gray eyes.

  “Sure, Geoff. You haven’t changed that much,” I said, and he lit up like a bulb. His vanity made him lively.

  “You would prefer something else for breakfast?” he said awkwardly, and I said, “No thanks. And we can speak English, if you want.”

  “You’ve got an American accent, Artie, may I call you Artie? It was your western name, wasn’t it?”

  “It still is.”

  We sat in the little restaurant, rain beating down outside. Maybe it was jetlag and I was wired, but I could see them all: my father; Gennadi; my mother, when she was pretty, young, contentious, not an old woman in a nursing home in Haifa, her mind claimed by Alzheimer’s. She no longer remembers my name.

  I finished the heavy brew and asked for another one. “Jesus. It’s really you, isn’t it? The guy in the bookstore called you? You knew it was me that called.”