Blood Count

by Reggie Nadelson

  Everything was gray, the tin-colored river where chunks of ice had formed, the buildings on the Queens side of the East River, everything except the red neon Pepsi sign. It was cold. I turned on the heater and put the radio on for the forecast. Snow. Fog. Cold. Sleet fell on my windshield.

  I drove. I tried Lily on my cell over and over, but she didn’t answer. The only time I’d seen her in a year had been six weeks earlier, election night, the Sugar Hill Club in Harlem.

  That night in November, when I see her, she looks wonderful. Her red hair sticking out from under a gold cardboard tiara, Obama’s name spelled out on it in glitter, Lily is wearing a white shirt, collar turned up in her jaunty way. She’s laughing. She doesn’t see me at first.

  “Lily?”

  “Hi, Artie,” she calls out to me, spotting me near the bar. “Hi,” she says, smiling, and then, for a moment, she’s swept away into the crowd.

  This is why I’m here. This is why I drove uptown, why I had jammed my car into the tight spot on 152nd where I saw the silver ghost van.

  I knew she’d been working on the Obama campaign, living uptown in a friend’s apartment. So when my pal Tolya Sverdloff had said, “Let’s go to Harlem election night,” I was OK with it. “I’ll meet you at the Sugar Hill Club,” I had said. I’d been here with Lily once or twice to listen to music. I figured she might show up.

  In the club, the tension is electric, everybody waiting for the results. In the club I see white faces, black, Latino, Asian. People are yakking in Russian, Italian, French. Tonight everybody is a believer. Once Obama is elected, everything will change, people say. If it happens; when it happens. Soon.

  The results are coming in, slowly at first. Inside the club, the TV hangs overhead like some ancient oracle, and with every win, the crowd turns to look.

  Yes we can!

  “Lily?”

  Almost a year since I’ve seen her. It’s a year since we agreed to stay away from each other. No calls. No e-mails. I’ve kept tabs on her as best I can. We know some of the same people.

  For a while I went to bars and coffee shops I knew she liked. Sometimes I went past her building on purpose and felt like an idiot standing on the corner of Tenth Street, watching out for her.

  How long have I known her? Almost fifteen years, on and off.

  The only thing I’d had from her all year was a handwritten note when Val died. Tolya’s daugther Valentina died and Lily wrote to me. Just that once. Only then.

  Now, Saturday morning driving through the gray city dawn, sleet coming down on my windshield, Lily, her desperate phone call earlier, election night, were all rattling through my head. Like a maniac, I drove to Harlem, dialing her phone number over and over, hurrying to see her, to help her. Lily needed me.

  “Artie? You knew I’d be here, didn’t you?” Lily says when she spots me at the club on election night. She’s close enough I can smell her perfume. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She gestures at the TV. “I mean, if we win.”

  “You’re superstitious?”

  “Yeah. I’m not hatching any chickens before they’re cooked.” She laughs. “That’s not right, is it? Oh, God, I’m so happy. Hello, Tolya, darling,” she says, hugging him as he appears, diamond Obama button blazing on his black silk shirt, magnum of champagne in his hand, pouring it in her glass, in mine, in his. Lily gulps her drink.

  “God, I wish they’d hurry the fuck up.” She glances at the TV screen. “So you guys thought I’d be here?”

  “Luck,” I say. Lily smiles. Tolya laughs. He knows I’m lying, knows I picked this joint because I thought Lily might come. He keeps his mouth shut. We’ve been best friends a long, long time.

  Suddenly, the noise in the club dies down. There’s a sudden hush. One more state. He’s almost in, somebody whispers.

  The anxiety is so solid it forms a sort of invisible shelf everybody seems to lean on. We’re glued to the TV. Lily clutches my arm. I smell her perfume again. Joy. It’s perfume I gave her.

  “What time is it?” somebody calls out. “Eleven,” somebody yells back. The bartender gets up on top of the bar so he can see better. In one hand is a red-and-white-checked dishcloth. In the other, a martini glass, as if he was in the middle of making a cocktail. He stands there, suspended, waiting.

  As I drove uptown on my way to Lily that Saturday morning, the weather guy on 1010 WINS was reporting lousy weather—snow, cold, sleet, airports shutting down, flights cancelled.

  Sudenly, I skidded. For a few seconds I was out of control. Like the silver van on election night.

  I got through it, kept heading north, trying to get to Lily as fast as I could. Where was she again? 155th Street? I knew she was in big trouble. I had heard it in her voice. Call me, I yelled into the phone, even though I was alone in the car.

  I was heading for a part of town I didn’t know at all. It made me edgy. If something went wrong—a crime, a death, an accident—I’d be a white cop in a black neighborhood at the other end of the city, where I didn’t know anybody, the Saturday before Christmas with a storm coming. Last time I’d been uptown was election night and that didn’t count, that had been a night out of real time when the whole city had dropped its tribal attitudes and celebrated together.

  Maybe I should call somebody, make some kind of contact in case I needed help, I thought. But until I knew what was wrong, I didn’t want to involve other people. Maybe Lily was just unhappy. She wouldn’t call me for that. Would she?

  I turned the radio up. The news was all bad. Financial shit, the system coming apart, Madoff’s arrest. The election, the blaze of optimism, the joy, already seemed a lifetime ago.

  “We did it!”

  Eleven o’clock. Eleven p.m. Somebody yells it out: “He’s in!” The club goes nuts. Somebody pounds out “Happy Days Are Here Again” on the piano. Up on the screen, I can see people going crazy, not just in New York, but in places like Iowa! Iowa!!

  Everybody is hugging and kissing, we’re all drunk, the bartender pops corks on bottles of pink champagne, somebody hands me a huge glass of bourbon. A girl in a silky red dress jams an Obama hat on my head and kisses me on the mouth. She’s drinking flavored vodka; she tastes like pears. Outside, cars are honking, people singing. Inside, everybody is yelling, crying, hugging, singing, high-fiving.

  Tolya, bottle in one hand, is dancing with a pretty woman almost as tall as him, in a silvery top, silk pants, high heels. A girl who looks like Beyoncé—at least she does to me, drunk as I am—bumps into me, and apologizes and laughs, and Tolya pours her some wine, too, and she says, “It’s sweet, isn’t it? Tonight it is so sweet.”

  “Where were you on election night 2008?” people will ask, the way they still ask each other about 9/11 or about the day JFK was shot. When I was a kid in Moscow, older people sometimes asked, Where were you when He died? and they meant Stalin. Where were you?

  But this time, this night, we’ll remember it differently, this life-changing event. We did it!

  On the TV, there are all the faces, people crying, older black people unable to stop crying. There’s Jesse Jackson in Chicago, face swamped with tears. Enough to break your heart.

  “We want Obama,” a guy near me in the club shouts. He says something in Italian. In English he adds, “Fuck Berlusconi, we want an Obama.” An Irish guy is hanging all over me, moaning, “I love this place. I love you guys.”

  “Now I can stay in America,” says Tolya. He’s never loved America the way I do, but tonight it’s different. He hugs me. “Now I can stay here.” In Russian, he adds, “Maybe I buy nice house in Harlem. Become black Russian.” He laughs and can’t stop.

  I put my arms around Lily. I can smell her hair, feel her against me. I kiss her. She doesn’t seem to mind, maybe because everybody is kissing, and for a moment, she’s with me again, and I’m lost.

  “ ‘Where were you that night?’ We’ll say that, won’t we?” she says, half to herself. “We’ll be able to say to each other, ‘Where were you that night
?’ And we’ll be able to say, ‘I was there. I saw him elected.’ We did it.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  And then Lily is pulled away from me, dancing now with a good-looking black guy, a young guy.

  They’re holding each other tight on the floor, and I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, that tonight everybody’s dancing, everybody’s in love, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Does it?

  For a second I lose sight of her, then she surfaces near the bar, her back to me.

  I think to myself: If she turns in my direction in the next five minutes, I’ll go to her. If she turns around, I’ll go over, I’ll tell her how I feel.

  But she doesn’t. She doesn’t turn around.

  By the time I got off the Drive, the snow was coming down heavy, and I took a wrong turn. I found myself on the Harlem side street where I’d parked on election night, then turned the car around. For a second or two, I was lost. I felt uneasy. The streets were empty.

  Finally, I pulled into Edgecombe Avenue. I found Lily’s building. Over the front door a plaque read THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG APARTMENTS. I looked up. The tall building was made of old brick. From a second floor overhang gargoyles—grotesque stone animals—leered down at me. The snow had settled onto the creepy figures.

  I got out of my car, left it near the front door, and ran up the steps to the building, bumping into an elderly man in a tweed coat and cap, who muttered at me. A woman trying to get a little girl zipped into a pink jacket looked up at me and looked pissed off, maybe because I was parked in a delivery zone, or maybe she didn’t like my looks. Or my color. Dog walkers emerged from the building, one of them stopping, fussing with her hand to get the snow off her shoulders. Except for me, everybody was black.

  I dialed Lily again. No answer. Anxiety, the kind that feels like a gust of icy wind on the back of your neck and along your spine, suddenly got to me. I stopped for a second, then I went inside.

  CHAPTER 4

  Red hair held back with a rubber band, face white, Lily looked frightened. Green sweatpants, an Obama shirt. She was waiting for me as I came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor.

  “God, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, taking hold of my sleeve. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice was flat, but she was shaking. With cold? With fear? She led me down the long corridor, stopped in front of a door marked 14B and hesitated.

  “This is your place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go inside. It’s cold.”

  “No. Across the hall.” Lily gestured to the door opposite hers.

  “What is it?”

  “Come with me.” She unlocked the door. We went into the apartment.

  “Whose place is this?” I said.

  The woman lay on a worn brown velvet sofa. Lily, who had locked the apartment’s front door behind us, pulled back a purple shawl to reveal her face.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Lily.

  I felt the woman’s neck for a pulse. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I never saw a dead body, not somebody I knew. Wars and stuff, but when you’re a reporter, it’s different. I thought I should cover her face.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “She was my friend.” Lily shivered. The room was freezing. “Who left the terrace door open?” Lily asked nervously.

  I went to shut the terrace door, where heavy silk curtains the color of cranberries—that Russian color somewhere between wine and blood—billowed in the bitter wind. When I turned around, Lily was staring at the dead woman.

  “She always said she could only sleep in a cold room because she was Russian,” said Lily.

  “Who is she? ”

  “Marianna Simonova. She was my friend.” Lily put her hand on the oxygen machine that stood near the sofa. I had seen one like it before. The oxygen tank was enclosed in a cube of light-blue plastic. It stood on wheels. A coil of transparent tubing ran from the tank to the woman’s nose. The oxygen was still on; it sounded like somebody breathing.

  “I left it like that,” said Lily. “I didn’t want to touch her.” She started to cry silently.

  “She was sick,” I said.

  “Yes.” Lily stumbled a little, moving back from the sofa. I got hold of her hand to keep her from falling.

  Her hand was ice cold. I rubbed it to make it warm. I could feel the electricity between us even now. It had always been like that with Lily and me, and I knew she felt it too. Abruptly, she pulled her hand away.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

  “I’m glad you called. Talk to me.”

  “Marianna was so sick, and I couldn’t help her.”

  “What with?”

  “Her lungs were shot. I think her heart couldn’t take it. She drank. She smoked like crazy. You can smell it everywhere.”

  I looked around the room with its high ceilings and fancy plaster moldings. The building must have gone up around 1920. The apartment needed a paint job. The yellow walls were grubby. The stink of cigarette smoke was everywhere; it came off the furniture, shabby rugs, the red silk drapes, off the dead woman.

  “What should I do?” said Lily.

  “Tell me what’s going on. You said she was your friend.”

  “Help me.” Lily sat down suddenly in a small chair with carved wooden arms; she sat down hard, as if her legs wouldn’t support her.

  I asked if Lily knew who the woman’s doctor was.

  “What for?”

  I told her somebody had to sign the death certificate. She said there was a guy in the next-door apartment who was a doctor. Maybe he could sign it. “They were friends,” Lily said. “Him and Marianna.”

  “Didn’t she have her own doctor?”

  “Of course. Sure.”

  “You have a name?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s better if somebody who was taking care of her signs the certificate,” I said, and wondered why Lily was suddenly wary.

  “Lucille Bernard,” she said finally. “Saint Bernard, Marianna called her. She could be pretty funny. She was funny.”

  “You met her? The doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a number?”

  “I took Marianna to an appointment once or twice,” Lily said. “At Presbyterian. Bernard’s office is in the hospital. I might have the number.”

  “Let’s call her.”

  “Why can’t we just get Lionel? I’ll go next door and get him.” Lily’s eyes welled up. She wiped her face with the back of her sleeve.

  “Lily? Honey? It was you who found her?”

  “Yes.

  “How come you didn’t call 911?”

  “Marianna was sick. I didn’t think it was an emergency, not if you die from being sick. Was that wrong?”

  “Of course not. Did anybody else see her like this? I mean before you found her?”

  “Why does it matter?” she said.

  “What about last night?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re interrogating me. She was sick. She just died. I’m sorry I called you out.” Lily seemed half out of her mind now. This dead woman on the sofa had obviously meant a lot to her in a way I didn’t understand.

  “Come on, honey,” I reached for her hand. “Let’s get the doctor’s number.”

  Lily didn’t move. Didn’t let me hold her hand.

  “Come on.”

  “Don’t nag me.”

  I sat on the floor near Lily’s little chair. “Is there something else going on?”

  “I’m just sad.”

  She was sad, but she was scared, too, and I had to know why. Was Lily lying? My gut told me she was holding stuff back. I switched on a standing lamp with a fringed shade. The low-wattage bulb spilled a dim pool of yellow light on the body.

  Marianna Simonova’s getup was like a costume. Her head was wrapped in a purple silk scarf, she wore a white shirt with a high neck,
Cossack style, a long skirt, and over it all, a heavy brown velvet bathrobe with fancy embroidery. Around her neck was a gold cross with red stones.

  Her hands were clasped across her body, one of them curled in a fist. I figured she was arthritic.

  It was as if she had been arranged—or had arranged herself—for death. There was no sign anyone had hurt her, no actual sign of her dying, either, except that she was dead. She was as composed as one of the icons on her mantelpiece.

  Kneeling by the sofa, I saw she wasn’t so old, no more than seventy. Her face was still smooth, and it was a long, imperious, oval face with a weirdly high forehead, thin, plucked eyebrows, a skinny nose.

  The fingers of her left hand were cold but still pliant. Rigor hadn’t set in yet. I touched the other hand. It wasn’t arthritic after all, just curled in a fist. I pulled back the fingers. Something she had been holding fell out. It was a horn button from a man’s jacket. I put it in my pocket.

  Simonova wasn’t a victim. Was she? This wasn’t some case I was working. But I took the button anyway, and then I touched her face. The skin was soft, almost alive, like one of those dolls they sell at fancy toy shops, the kind with the creepy feel of human flesh.

  On the floor was a biography of Rasputin in Russian, and a paperback, an English mystery, the kind my mother used to love, which she read secretly in her kitchen back in Moscow. She hid them in a kitchen cupboard with the potatoes. I remembered them all.

  A little table near the sofa, black and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was piled with pill bottles, a half-empty liter of cheap American vodka, a pack of Sobranies, most of them already smoked, a glass ashtray full of the butts. A small glass with water still in it had red lipstick on the rim, and there was a bottle of perfume. I took out the stopper, smelled it. From the low chair where she was sitting, Lily watched me.

  “Artie?”

  “What?”

  “Please cover Marianna up,” Lily said. “I feel like she can see me.”

  I put the shawl back over the dead woman’s face, which is when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the tip of the woman’s left ring finger was missing, and the flesh where it had been cut was thick with scar tissue.