Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

I believed him because I had to.

  We were in a big car, a Rolls-Royce, me wrapped in a blanket, Tolya next to me. I was shaking. I could hear my own teeth. The soft leather in the back smelled nice. He said again, in Russian this time, “Bastards.”

  I looked at him. He looked lousy, the skin gray, a gash over his one eye that someone stitched in a hurry, a purple bruise on the other; the bruised eye was half shut.

  “You look like shit,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Makes two of us. They banged you around some, put your head in a bucket. Not fun guys.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The usual creeps.”

  “Russian? Ukrainian?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Someone at the hospital found a list of numbers on you. My cellphone was one of them. I got into London a few hours ago. They had the driver’s name, and I got to him. We talked Las Vegas. He showed me where it happened. The style was familiar. They were stupid, these creeps; they went drinking in a bar near by to get out of the rain. I found them.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Jesus, Tol, what time is it? How long have I been like this?”

  He looked at his Rolex. “One a.m. Five, six hours you’re like this, I guess. Maybe more.”

  “The same assholes that killed Warren Pascoe and Prudence Vane came for me?”

  “Who is Prudence Vane?”

  “Never mind. How come they didn’t kill me?”

  “Luck. You’re an American. They don’t want extra problems maybe.”

  “They’re alive?”

  Tolya didn’t answer.

  “Answer me.”

  “Don’t ask me, OK? What’s the difference? They were nobody. Small little people.”

  “Where are we?”

  “My car.”

  “We’re going someplace?”

  “Hotel.”

  “How come? You got apartments here, buildings, the one I’m using. We can go there.”

  “No.”

  I hurt worse now I was really conscious. I mumbled, “Tell me some jokes.”

  He told me some very old jokes in Russian about sex and politicians and cheap sausages. The blinding rain made it impossible to see, and by the time he finished the jokes, we were in a hotel garage.

  There was a glossy brochure on a table. River Palace, five stars. Canary Wharf. Tolya stood in the doorway to an adjoining room. “You want a doctor?”

  “I had enough doctors.”

  Tolya shoved me towards the bathroom. Out of the window I could see the river. It was high and bruised, the rain drove down on it and made it pitch right up against the embankment. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the waa waa of the sirens.

  In the bathroom that filled softly up with steam, I lay in the tub, hot water up to my neck. It took all my energy to soak a washcloth and spread it over my face. After a while, my frozen joints began to thaw. Tolya squatted on the toilet holding a bottle of brandy, pouring it into big glasses. He said, “Drink,” and I drank and said, “Gimme a smoke, OK?”

  He went into the other room and came back with a carton, an ashtray, his gold lighter.

  I looked at him. “You’re in trouble, man. Aren’t you?”

  He said, “I’m in trouble? You should talk,” but he didn’t laugh.

  “You do business with Leo Mishkin and Leo is Eddie Kievsky’s brother-in-law.”

  He reached up to a radio on a shelf and turned it to a music station. “We will speak English now, but softly,” he said. “And I will order some food.”

  There were no querulous medics, no stinking creeps, no radio voices. Just the lovely liquid piano, Oscar Peterson and his trio and Rogers and Hart. Oscar played “I’ll Take Manhattan.”

  The steam was thick on the mirrors and ceiling. My lungs were still sore.

  After I got out of the bathtub, I found a thick terrycloth robe and put it on. I went into Tolya’s room, which connected with mine. A waiter rolled a table in; it was loaded with food – soup, roast chicken, hot rolls, heavy Barolo. I couldn’t lift the spoon. I stumbled back into my room and on to the bed, and switched on the TV.

  On the tube, a guy with a big nose, curly hair and a pinky ring came on and began interrogating a couple of politicians. Was there flooding near the Dome? Had the excavation for the Dome damaged the old tidal walls? I never heard an interviewer so rough in my life. He commented on the guests’ ages and ailments and frailties, and I thought, Jesus, you’d never get a New York cop to go one on one with him for a million bucks after taxes. But it made me laugh, and laughing hurt. I switched off the set and turned the radio back on. I fell asleep just before dawn with only Oscar playing faintly from the radio.

  *

  When I woke up, it was dark again. I reached for a light. The door opened.

  “What time is it?”

  “Six o’clock,” Tolya said. I had slept through the tag end of the night and most of the day after. He said, “You are feeling better?”

  “I’m good.” I sat up. Reached for my jeans, felt in the pockets, then got out of bed in a panic. My passport was gone.

  “I fix,” said Tolya. “Tomorrow.”

  I looked at him. “Yeah, OK.”

  “Now we party.”

  “Party?”

  “Eat. Party. Meet people. Makes us feel good, see what we hear, who we see, have fun. I’ll call Lily.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be one giant asshole, Artyom. This girl loves you. You need her.”

  “Mind your own fucking business. You have no idea what you’re taking about.”

  “We go out together then, you, me.”

  “Why are we talking English?”

  He shrugged. “Between possibility of Russian bastards listening in or British asshole, I pick British asshole.”

  “I need some clothes.”

  “Clothes are here. I sent driver already.” He pulled on his cashmere blazer. “Let’s go to party.”

  The windshield wipers beat the panes, Tolya’s beefy driver drove carefully and the car rolled smooth as cream down the road. My ribs were sore. Tolya handed me his phone and I tried Lily because I was scared for her. Missed her. There was no one home. I left a message with Isobel Cleary.

  On the back seat was a pile of papers. All the papers carried Pru Vane’s murder. I scanned them fast. No one mentioned me. I had disappeared.

  We cruised London a while, stopping in a couple of fancy hotel bars. More than before I had the sense of a place that changed at night – you pulled up out of the dark, wet, vast city, and light spilled out of bars and pubs and restaurants, and everywhere, people knew Tolya. Hands reached out for him. Booze appeared. At a restaurant with stained-glass windows, we ate Chateaubriand so rare it was practically alive. At a fancy nightclub in a townhouse, we ran into Eddie Kievsky, who shook my hand and showed Sverdloff the Fabergé egg. He kept it in his pocket. Kievsky was smooth; Sverdloff looked uneasy, and we moved on.

  The car pulled away and a few minutes later, I said to him, “You have any ready cash, Tolya?”

  He laughed, but bitterly, and said in Russian, “Big picture is, I’m broke.”

  Tolya Sverdloff liked the night. He liked to work it, and he was never so broke or so drunk he couldn’t enjoy himself. He put his ear to the ground, he said; listening for news, gossip, information, entertainment. “At night, people looking for contacts,” he said. He switched constantly from Russian to English and back, and as he got drunker, his Russian got better and his English fell apart.

  In the second club, a casino with mauve silk walls, he listened to a woman in a green dress. Even while he put the make on her, he listened sympathetically. Then we got back in the car and sped down the embankment towards Docklands, Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs. I knew my way better here. I could follow the routes.

  Tolya talked. He had a piece of apartment buildings along the Thames down to Teddington and up to the Barrie
r, he crowed. He talked about property like it was sex. Manhattan on the Thames, he said. London’s Hong Kong. But I knew him. He was nervous. We stayed north of the river most of the time, the other side from the apartment on Butler’s Wharf. Over here, this side, the north side of the river, Sverdloff said, was a boom town in a boom town, Tolya said.

  East from Tower Bridge all the way to the estuary, he added. Plenty of room left. Isle of Dogs. Surrey Docks. Silvertown. Millennium Mills.

  We drove, he talked. There were thousands of acres of eerie landscape, a few decayed remnants of the massive Royal Docks, the waterways, canals where the big ships once unloaded. Once, there were chemical plants and rubber processing and no one cared how toxic any of it was, not then, when the chemical manufacturers came in the 1870s. There were railheads next door and a ton of money to be made. For a hundred years, even more, there had been a seething, belching, filthy, noisy life to this place; now it was creepily quiet. You wondered how much toxic crap remained in the soil, the riverbed, the air.

  A few skyscrapers loomed. There was some open space, but the landscape was half finished, the parks rough, the buildings covered with scaffolding. The apartment houses looked like Lego. Sverdloff showed me the Tate and Lyle plant at the edge of the river. “Sugar,” he said. “My great grandfather traded sugar in Petersburg.”

  Through the wet car window, he watched closely. He pointed out the Millennium Dome, a huge erector set of a monument, a flying saucer set upside down, legs in the air.

  Foreigners liked it here, he said. They felt happiest here. They could fly in and out fast. Short-haul airports. Private strips. Heliports. Marinas. Here was a whole new city dedicated to skyscrapers, money and tax breaks. Here, in the slick apartments and anonymous office buildings and the brass and glass hotels and restaurants, among the babble of foreign voices, England seemed to disappear.

  The façade of the massive hotel was copper colored. The doorman, rigged out in a Tsarist uniform, looked like an extra from a Mosfilm epic. He spun the door for us, and tipped his fur hat to Sverdloff.

  In the lobby, nightclub, casino, all of them jammed, there were Russian voices. Rich Russians. Russians circling the tables, tossing down chips for bets like they were candy. Sverdloff reached casually in his pocket, found a couple of hundred pounds, picked up a few chips, then tossed them on the roulette table.

  “I thought you were broke.”

  “Don’t be so bourgeois, Artyom.”

  Then he hit. He picked up the money and stuffed it in his pocket and moved on.

  Tolya glanced around and said, “At night, people take off their faces. No illusion. Everything is on table.”

  He took a corner table and ordered wine. A band played elevator muzak.

  I said, “So we learned something from the night? We learned the birch trees are weeping, or what? Can you fucking return from Planet Russian Fantasy and talk to me? Why don’t you tell me about your so-called bank and the foreclosures, Tolya? It’s Eddie Kievsky’s bank. Isn’t it? You can drop the bullshit act.”

  “I bought too much, Artyom,” he said in English. “All over Docklands I buy in Eighties, early Nineties, when was dying here. Good stuff. Bad stuff. Doesn’t matter, I buy cheap. Ninety-eight, Russia on its knees, rouble falls apart, I am laughing. My money is in property. Now the market is swollen, fat, bloated.” His voice fell.

  I kept quiet.

  “Say someone pulls plug. Say real-estate market tumbles. Rumors here. Rumors there. Market goes belly up, everything goes down like dominoes. It was plan. Listen to me.”

  “Is that what the foreclosure notices were about?”

  “Maybe. I’m trying to fix something, OK?”

  “Something here?”

  “Here, yes. Mob chiefs – all of them, Russian, Jap, Chinese, Mafia – two, three years ago, they met in Beaune to divide Europe, no one even noticed, the locals were at a goddamn wine auction.” He laughed mirthlessly. “The Russians asked for Britain. Russians always like London, I was already in. I already buy Docklands, land, building, apartment, office.”

  “You were in on it?”

  “Sure. I’m real-estate guy, I’m in. We borrow from banks we also own.”

  “Russian banks? Eddie Kievsky’s banks?”

  “Yes. Now market is volatile, up, down, up.”

  “You’re telling me the banks foreclose on purpose?”

  “We sell a little. Markets get nervous. We sell some more. We take financial reporter to nice lunch at Pont de la Tour. Discuss overbuilding on river. Discuss overheated market. Article appears, maybe FT, Herald Tribune.”

  “Christ, so you fuck with the market and start all over again?”

  He looked nervous, twisting his head constantly.

  I said, “Eddie Kievsky makes you nervous.”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew all along he was Leo Mishkin’s brother in law?”

  “Sure.”

  “When I got to London, to your apartment, there was a dummy with my face on it. It was a message to stay away from you? A message for me. Who from?”

  He turned away. “Kievsky’s creeps. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re in bed with these guys, Tolya? You do business with them?”

  “I did.” Tolya switched back to Russian. “I am trying to fix it now, but it’s hard to put the genie back in her bottle. Listen to me. Tomorrow I’ve got to go back to Moscow. See the kid, OK. I got a problem. They came for me, they beat him up again. Knocked his teeth out. How’s he going to work as an actor without his teeth? I’m bad luck right now. Stay away. Go home to New York.” He leaned in my face. “Go home.”

  “What about Phillip Frye? Is he also in bed with Kievsky?”

  “Kievsky gave him money for his charity.”

  “What’s he been giving Kievsky?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  We finished the night in the hotel strip joint. It was called the Sugar Reef. One wall was made of glass. On the other side was a huge pool. There was a wave machine and colored lights, neon fish and make-believe coral reef and strands of seagrass that waved seductively to the lights and music.

  Tolya took a front-row seat, put his face up against the glass, was transfixed. The girls in the pool were got up like mermaid or fish. They stripped in the pool, then bobbed up above the water line for tips.

  Customers threw the girls bills and they caught them in their hands or fins or sometimes their teeth. More guys, eyes moist, put money at the end of toy fishing reels like bait. I laughed. Tolya shoved an elbow in my ribs. He takes his strippers serious, as he informed me a long time back when we were in a Brighton Beach club in Brooklyn and I made the mistake of laughing at the girls. I asked for Scotch; he ordered the bottle.

  A girl with enormous melons hung on her chest smooched him through the glass. He raised his eyebrow, grinned at a naked woman with a tail who swam up alongside the other babe and kissed the glass. Tolya leaned forward, his face dimpling, and kissed her back.

  I put my hand on the glass. A lobster swam up to me and winked. Tolya leaned over and kissed her, then turned to me and stuffed the thick wad of cash he won earlier in my hand. He said softly, “Will this buy you the information you want?”

  I thought about Gilchrist. “Yes,” I said. “So tell me, these guys, Mishkin, Kievsky, tell me yes or no because I’m getting nervous here, man, did they kill people we both know about? Are you in business with them, in or out?”

  He got up to go. “This is problem for me, Artyom. I must go now. I will call you.”

  “In or out?”

  “Half in, half out.”

  31

  My passport lay on Jack Cotton’s bare metal desk at his station house next to a crude poster. I had slept badly after I left Sverdloff at the strip club and went back to the apartment. I dreamed too much and couldn’t remember what I dreamed. A polite young guy in uniform showed up the next morning and said Jack couldn’t come himself, but he had something for me.

  I picked
my passport up. “Thank you.”

  He said, “You’ll need a new one. This one’s fucked.” It was stained with water. I leaned against the desk.

  “Sit down, Artie, OK. We have to talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk, Jack. I’m on vacation. Remember? I’m a tourist.”

  “You’re an American. All Americans want to talk.” He pushed the red and gold Dunhills towards me.

  “Fuck you.”

  He grabbed my wrist. “Sit down. Please. And listen to me.”

  I sat down. “I’m listening.”

  Jack Cotton said, “Prudence Vane is dead. It turns out you were out with her the night before. People saw you, man. Warren Pascoe is murdered. Your passport turns up at his studio. We find a pair of Russians near by, one also dead, the other as good as. I get a message from a casualty unit, they’ve got an American. Now, I never mentioned your name when we heard about the Vane woman. Or Warren Pascoe’s death. Or the Russians. None of this is my territory, but I covered for you. You’re in London, what, five, six days, Artie, and people die.”

  I looked at the cup Cotton’s assistant brought me and said, “What is this shit?”

  “Tea.”

  “Please.”

  “You want coffee instead?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  Quietly, Cotton said, “I’m not saying anything about anything, but help me out here, Artie, man, OK?” He reached over and shut his door with his foot. Jack Cotton wore black suede shoes with rubber soles. He took the thick mug and drank the tea himself. “We’re on the same side, Art.”

  “Are we? Can I go?”

  “No. You asked me to help you out on Phillip Frye. We know he stinks. I want us to work on this. We will get him if you work with me.”

  “Especially if he’s faking the theft of his own address book so he can extort his own contributors.”

  Jack looked up. “Christ, Artie, is that what it is?”

  “That’s what Pru thought.”

  He said, “She told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d testify?”

  I didn’t answer. I said, “You got a pal at the morgue?”

  “If I need one.”

  “A guy with a cleft palate that lived in one of Frye’s shelters, brain tumor, liver disease, they must have paper on him, ask when he died, and if any of Warren’s models came via Frye’s shelters.”