Blood Count

by Reggie Nadelson

  Rubbing my head, I discovered a lump like a walnut on the back.

  “She must have had a rough time growing up in the USSR,” I said.

  Lily looked at me. “I’m glad you understand, Artie. Of all people, I knew you’d get it. It’s one of the reasons I wanted you here. Marianna had survived everything—the war, the Cold War, the whole fucking thing,” said Lily. “How come novels about women are hardly ever epic? It’s always about, I don’t know, domestic shit. About the little things, about marriage and babies and shopping for food at Trader Joe’s, or nannies, or living in Park Fucking Slope, or some other shit, and it’s the men who write the big books, even the big books about women, like Anna Karenina, and all she ever did was moon around about some bastard and then kill herself. Men go into space; we just go to the grocery store.”

  I reached over the counter for the Scotch, poured a little more in our glasses.

  “I wanted to go to the moon, Artie. Or some place big. But I settled for other people’s lives, their stories. Marianna’s was the best; I told you I made her talk into a tape recorder. ‘What this is for, Lily? You plan to reveal my secrets, you tell everything to world?’ She would say stuff like that—and it was half serious, half a joke.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I have my voice recorder in the bedroom,” said Lily. “Sometimes I used it. Sometimes she did her own recording on a cassette player I got her. She didn’t understand digital stuff that well.”

  “Where are the tapes?”

  “She kept some. I have some. A lot of what she said was in Russian. I’d ask the questions in English, but she said she could only think and talk properly in her own language.”

  “I can translate for you. Do you want me to do that?”

  Lily ignored my question.

  “She was still a believer, of course. The Communist Party,” said Lily. “She gets to the U.S., she joins the Party here. I can’t believe she’s dead, just like that.”

  “I know you feel guilty about her meds or something, but it wasn’t your fault. I tried to tell you this morning.”

  “How do you know?” Lily looked at me desperately.

  “Tell me about the meds. How come you were at the drugstore?”

  “I was just tying up loose ends, you know, closing Marianna’s account, stuff like that.”

  “You said you were getting meds for her?”

  “Did I? I must have been out of my mind. I feel I could be going nuts, you know, Artie?”

  I held her hand.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you mind? Is that OK,” said Lily. “I’m just so tired.”

  I stood up. “Fine,” I said. “Sure. Whatever you want.” I was tired, too, tired of the deceptions.

  “You can’t let it go, can you?” she said. “Even when Lionel was here, you had to know, you had to keep asking him questions like he was a suspect.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me he knew she was dead early this morning, when I saw him out on his terrace? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “For God’s sake, you don’t think Lionel’s involved, do you? He was her friend.”

  “I’ll let it go if you want me to.”

  “Let what go? What is there to let go?” she said. “You need to let go of being a cop, but you can’t, can you—it’s like it’s in your genes, asking questions, finding the place where it matters. Just like your dad,” she added. “Like in the KGB.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I kept my mouth shut.

  “But that’s your genius, the way you get people to talk to you, isn’t it?” Lily said. “Isn’t that your thing?”

  I turned away and walked across the room to the window again. The pane was cold. After a minute or two, Lily came and stood beside me. She put her hand on my arm.

  “Artie? I didn’t mean to be cruel,” she said. “It’s a talent, asking questions, getting the answers you want. I know. I have it, too. It’s what reporters do. Same as you. Sometimes I hate myself for it—you just keep on asking and asking, pushing at people, and sometimes it’s when they’re hurting.”

  “Was it the cop stuff that got in the way with us? I know it bothered you. I know you hated the stuff I had to do.”

  She was silent.

  “But he’s a cop. Radcliff.”

  “Who you are is a cop; right at the very core of your being you’re a New York detective. It’s what you wanted and you got it, and it’s who you are,” said Lily, both of us standing at the window, our faces pressed against the glass, looking out at the snow.

  “And him?”

  “It’s something he wanted to do. But he’ll get it out of his system and then he’ll go on to something else.”

  “I see.”

  “I feel happy with Virgil right now.” She looked at me. “Shit, I’m sorry. You know I could never lie to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Didn’t you feel happy with me?”

  “It was different,” said Lily. “It was a different kind of being happy. With you and me it had to be the whole thing. We were too connected. We both spent some of our lives in hellish places seeing horrible things. We shared that. You brought it home. So did I.”

  “We shared other things,” I said. “We shared music, and the city, and trips to Montana, and friends. For a long time, almost fifteen years,” I said. “What happened to us?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Fifteen years since the hot summer night outside St. Vincent’s, where I’d first met Lily. I’d been waiting for somebody to die. There had been a shooting and I was on the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, staring up at the hospital and smoking. It was after midnight, a sultry New York night. Lily was waiting, too. She asked for a light, or maybe I asked her for one.

  That night, we smoked and waited. She’d pointed out the school across the street, where she’d gone when she was a little girl. There had been something about her—hair, eyes, voice—that made me want her bad right then. Our first date, we went to Bradley’s to hear music. She already loved my music, Miles, Ella, Stan Getz. I taught her to love Louis Armstrong.

  I knew right away, but for once I had let things take a little time, time for us to listen to music some more, time to go for a walk, stop for a drink, or dinner. It was a week, maybe two, before we’d gone to bed together. It was so good.

  Lily had been born in New York and still lived in the apartment on Tenth Street where she grew up. I had fallen in love with the city as soon as I got off the plane, or maybe before. I think I was in love with New York before I ever saw it. As soon as I met Lily, I’d felt she was New York. With her, I felt I had come home.

  That summer, we walked over the Brookyn Bridge, we took picnics to Central Park, and rode the Staten Island Ferry late at night. She came to ball games with me at the stadium and cheered like a crazy person. We haunted the city’s bookstores.

  Reading was Lily’s obsession. She read everything—she had five, six books on the go at one time, novels, history, whatever she could get her hands on, and she could read a book in an evening. She told me she had once had a dream, a half-awake kind of dream, that she could eat books, and that if she could she would be able to read everything; one of her worries was that she’d never get through them all, all the books that remained, the ones she hadn’t read, the ones she had to read again. She read like a hungry woman.

  Lying there on my sofa, she’d devour the book in her hand, still glancing up at the TV to comment on a ball game.

  She had learned how to fish for my sake, though our first time out on the Yellowstone River in Montana she cast her hook into my neck. We couldn’t stop laughing. She was a lousy cook—she said so, and didn’t care, so long as we could get some decent takeout, Chinese, Thai, Indian—and her driving was worse, though she thought she was a hot-shot behind the wheel. When she drove, I held my breath or just looked out the window as if the scenery interested me.

  Lily had worked on TV, for newspapers and magazines. She had covered wa
rs, she had been to the Soviet Union—she understood the place I had left, and why. She had taken on tough stuff like the sex trade, and she had a do-good streak a mile wide, which she admitted, but she could laugh at herself. If there was a guy begging on the street, she’d give him money and ask how she could help. She was particularly fond of a guy on my block who used to panhandle for “The United Negro Pastrami Fund.”

  “Anybody who makes me laugh gets an extra five bucks,” she always said.

  Of everybody I knew, had ever known, she was the most generous. She gave more than she could afford, she bought presents for people, she found them jobs, she helped their kids. And then forgot about it. Oh, did I do that? she’d say, astonished and pleased.

  Restless as she was, her friends were the most important thing in her life; it was sacred to her, this friendship thing. It mattered more than any belief system or politics or job. You were Lily’s friend, it was forever, for good. The only time I ever saw her cry was when one of her oldest friends simply disappeared from her life and never told her why, though I would have liked to kill the bastard for hurting her.

  I had proposed to Lily once, one New Year’s Eve, but she’d refused. I never knew if it was my job, or because she wanted her freedom, as she saw it. We both, Lily and me, let other people get in the way, but it was mostly my fault, I had fucked it up. I’d been a jerk. I didn’t know if I could get her back, now or ever.

  Lily believed you could make the world better. Anyhow, she made me better than I was, than I am. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t known Lily. Long time now.

  “Lily?”

  She was at the kitchen counter, now, head down. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or crying. I wanted to hold her, take her away. I had never felt I wanted to do anything so much. I stayed where I was.

  “I’m sorry I was such an asshole with Dr. Hutchison. Honest, I am,” I said.

  She looked up. “I was just resting my eyes.” Lily went to the stereo. She pressed a button. “Listen.”

  It was Stan Getz’s People Time, an album I had given her.

  “You play this a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “For Radcliff?”

  “Come over here.” Lily sat on the gray sofa. I sat next to her. “You can’t just go on hating him,” she said.

  I laughed. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s my friend, and I like him.”

  “More than a friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody you spend nights with.”

  “You weren’t around, Artie.”

  “You either.”

  “I know that, but you married somebody else.”

  “Because you wouldn’t marry me. Because we couldn’t make it work. Not that my marriage worked.” I shrugged. “Maybe I can’t make anything work.”

  “I think about you,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “But Virgil’s good for me. He’s a good guy and he’s around and I like him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I heard you were seeing Valentina Sverdloff. Before she died.”

  I had been waiting for her to say it.

  “I wasn’t seeing her.”

  “But you loved her.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Tolya. Your friend, but mine, too. We always keep in touch, you know? Tolya and me. He told me he knew you’d loved his daughter, and he told you he’d kill you if you went near her—Val was half your age. But after she was gone, after she was murdered, he was sorry he didn’t let it happen; he knew you had loved her and that she felt the same way about you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Things happen. It was hard for me, too,” said Lily. “Val was a fantastic girl. She was like the little sister I never had.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s not just Val.”

  “What else?”

  “I just want to be happy, or at least content, if I can,” Lily said. “I can’t just drop Virgil. I don’t want to.”

  I wanted to say, Are you in love with him? but I was too scared to ask. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Play that album for him?”

  “No.” Lily leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I saw she still liked me, I saw it in her face, and I thought, right then, that maybe I still had a chance.

  This was as close as I’d been to her for a long time. I remembered the times we had spent together, places we’d gone.

  We used to love bars, all kinds, fancy bars, low-life bars, music clubs. It was one of the things we did, drinking, eating, wandering around the city, the boroughs.

  Not getting drunk, just drinking. We drank in jazz clubs, at funny Korean cocktail lounges where they brought the booze in a watermelon. We’d gone to Brazilian joints where there were pineapple caipirinhas; to Beatrice’s place, where we knocked back bottles of Nebbiolo; to Fanelli’s for beers. Sometimes we had consumed silly cocktails in small, slightly seedy hotels, old places on Madison and Lex, places no one we knew went to.

  We’d hang out in booths, half hidden, sipping our drinks, making out, laughing, desperate to run out, grab a cab, and go home to bed. We used to make out in the cabs, too, and in the elevators, all the way up to her place or mine.

  Sitting on the sofa in the Armstrong apartment, I just took Lily’s hand and put it against my face.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Dr. Hutchison signed off; I’m OK. I really am. I mean it. This is over.”

  “Thank you.” She patted my cheek and took her hand back. Lily seemed to have reclaimed her usual self. As if now that Simonova’s funeral had been arranged, she could cope.

  All I wanted now was for Simonova to be buried. I didn’t ask again why Lily had lied about calling Dr. Bernard. I didn’t want to know. I tried to forget I’d been hit on the head in the storage room. That Lionel Hutchison was covering up something and Lucille Bernard had been Amahl Washington’s doctor around the time he died.

  I could do it. I could forget. My time as a cop was almost over. I didn’t want the life any more. Had I always brought the work home? It had fucked us up, me and Lily. Maybe Virgil Radcliff could do the job right; maybe it was his time.

  When Lily had said to me about Simonova “I killed her,” I knew she’d made a mistake, or was covering for somebody. She couldn’t have hurt the woman who’d been her friend.

  But what if she had? Would I lie for her? Run with her? I began to sweat, cold, dank sweat that dripped down the middle of my back. I pushed it all away.

  Twelve hours, give or take, it would be done. Sunday morning, Simonova would be buried. I wanted to make Lily feel better. I wanted to tell her again, “You didn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. Not to your friend.”

  I got up. “Come with me,” I said.

  “Where?”

  I held out my hand. She took it.

  CHAPTER 21

  So far as I could tell, nothing had been touched in Simonova’s apartment except the sofa where I’d first seen her body. It was rumpled now. The shawl that had covered her was on the floor; the funeral home guys who lifted her onto a gurney must have dropped it.

  I made my way around the room while Lily waited near the door. I picked up bits of paper from the desk, I went into the bedroom, and looked briefly through Simonova’s clothes. It would take days to search the whole place.

  In the living room, Lily was kneeling at the little table by the sofa, looking at the pills.

  “Which ones do you think you screwed up?”

  Lily picked up a plastic box, the days marked on it, and opened the lid.

  “This one,” she said. “I think I forgot this one.” She poured the remaining capsules onto her palm. “I always counted. There’s one more than there should be.”

  “Show me.”

  I took the capsule, read what was marked on it.

  “Why are you smiling?” Lily said.

  “Because these are ACE inhibitors, bl
ood pressure medication, Lily, honey. And it’s a low dosage. And you couldn’t kill a mouse if you forgot one, or probably ten or a hundred. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  “I was scared. How do you know, anyway?”

  “Tolya takes this stuff. He says it interferes with his eating grapefruit, and I tell him to eat caviar instead. I tell him he’s an ass. It’s fine, honey.” Putting my arm around her, “Is that why you went to the drugstore?”

  She nodded. “I was trying to figure out if Marianna had another prescription, if there were meds I didn’t know about that I forgot to get, or she forgot. She sometimes got confused, especially when her breathing was very bad. It took all her will to concentrate.”

  “Who would have prescribed something for her that you didn’t know about?”

  “I don’t know. But there wasn’t anything. At the drugstore, anyway,” said Lily. “I’m sorry I’ve been so crazy. God, I’m so glad you’re here. I was sure I had done something awful.” She reached out for my hand. “Thank you.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “You know what?”

  “What, honey?”

  “I miss Tolya. Let’s call him and tell him to come over or something. Come on, I’ll make some coffee. I’ll get out some wine. Let’s go back to my place.” Lily made for the door. “You know, if I hadn’t seen you on election night, I might not have had the guts to call you this morning.”

  “I’d always come,” I said. “You’re OK now? About the meds? You believe me now, that you didn’t have anything to do with her death?”

  “I guess. Yes. I do. I’m going to believe you.”

  I looked at the portrait of Paul Robeson on the wall.

  “What is it?” Lily said.

  “My mother got her gold earrings to see Robeson perform in Moscow. Whenever he came to Moscow to perform, everybody dressed up, some even in evening clothes, the kind that were normally forbidden in the ‘people’s paradise,’ ” I said. “My father got tickets once and my mother says, ‘What will I wear, Maxim? I haven’t got anything nice enough.’ So he takes her out and buys her a blue silk dress and gold earrings with little diamonds, the kind every Soviet woman wanted back then, and it costs him two months’ salary, but she’s so happy. Afterwards, they sit up all night in the kitchen discussing the concert and how heroic Robeson is. My mother told me.” I looked at Robeson’s portrait again. “It must have been like coming home for you in some ways,” I said to Lily. “And for Simonova, too.”