Londongrad (18 page)

Sleepless, I wandered through the house. On the marble mantel in the living room was a stack of invitations, heavy white cards. I picked them up. Balls. Parties. Picnics. Races. One was for Saving Girls, a charity ball. Host: Anatoly Sverdloff. It was Val’s charity. I looked at the date. The night after the next. I’d be there. I wanted to know what these people had heard, how much they knew. Russians.

From the room where I crawled into bed finally, but still restless, I leaned on one arm and looked out the side street window. Tolya’s SUV was there, and his guy, Ivan, was leaning against it, smoking. I could see the burning red tip of his smoke.

A minute or two later, another car drove slowly up the street, slowly maybe just to avoid the speed bumps, maybe because the driver was looking for something.

I changed rooms. I went to bed in a room away from the street. I put the gun Tolya had given me on the bedside table. The clock, an alarm clock in a blue leather case, was next to it. The illuminated green dial read 3.04.

Couldn’t sleep. Got up one more time, smoked a while, standing at the window, saw black shapes outside, something in the gardens, maybe just teenagers, maybe something else. I felt trapped between the two sides of the house.

Exhausted, jet-lagged, so heavy I felt like I was carrying somebody else, another whole body, on my back, I dozed. Except for a few miserable hours sucking in stale air on the plane, I hadn’t slept for a couple of nights.

Only now, in my half-sleep, then in my dreams, did I finally grasp that Valentina was really gone. I pushed my face into the pillow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Bray was the name of the little town where Tito Dravic had worked. Bobo Leven got me the information same as he got me the information that Dravic had turned up in Belgrade and refused to talk to anyone. I was guessing he was scared by Masha’s murder, by offering to help me. Scared him so bad he’d left New York.

The town was an hour out of London, and the River Inn where Dravic had been a waiter sat in a plush green grove of trees on the banks of the river Thames. Yellow-green willows brushed their feathery branches against the water.

A lovely sweet smell came up as I got out of the cab from the train station, green, fresh, light years from the crappy playground where Masha had been tied up to the swing.

Another part of Tolya’s make-believe paradise was the English countryside. I knew Tolya had a country mansion someplace. His Eden.

“Ten pounds,” said the irritable cab driver when I gave him dollars by mistake.

Even before I got to the front door of the hotel, it hit me that Dravic had known Masha Panchuk better than he said, and that he knew her long before she got to New York.

How bad did it hurt when he found out she had a husband, that she was probably going out with other guys, maybe working as a hooker? Did he watch her with men at the club in Brooklyn and want to kill her?

As I left the parking lot at the inn I noticed the same Mercedes SUV I had seen from the window the night before, the SUV that rolled slowly over the speed bumps on Tolya’s street; or maybe I was just going nuts.

“Can I help you?”

The hotel smelled of polish and fresh flowers. In the bar off the lobby, a young guy was setting up for lunch. Chilling bottles of white wine in a tub of ice as delicately as if they were tiny missiles, he clocked my presence and asked for the second time if he could help.

“Can I help you, sir?” I wasn’t sure why I did it at first, but I twisted my wrist to glance at the gold Rolex I had taken from Tolya’s place because I’d left my watch in New York. I made my accent slightly foreign, faintly Russian. I realized he had seen the watch, had taken note of my accent.

The Rolex sat on my wrist, big as a quarter pounder, gold, diamonds surrounding the dial.

“I’d like some coffee, please,” I said.

“Of course,” said the waiter attentively. “Would you like some breakfast, sir?”

I said I’d be out on the terrace where tables were set for lunch. As I sat down, I asked for some cigarettes, took Tolya’s lighter out of my pocket, flicked it in the sun, examined the familiar design—a cigar engraved on the surface with a large ruby for the burning tip. Tolya always carried it. The waiter who had seated me rushed away to get my coffee and a newspaper. He obviously figured me for somebody with dough, maybe a rich Russian.

From where I sat I could watch boats drift along the water, the beautiful houses on the other side, a few kids scrambling down the bank, and then, without me really noticing at first, a man emerged from the hotel and sat at the table farthest from mine, next to a large terracotta pot of red geraniums.

He wore jeans and a white t-shirt. He spoke Russian softly into his phone. He saw me look. Nodded politely like well-bred strangers in some period movie, then closed his phone and opened his copy of the
Financial Times.

When the waiter brought my coffee, I peeled a ten off the wad of Tolya’s notes I had in my pocket and said, “You have a minute?”

He nodded. I asked him about Tito Dravic. He said he knew Dravic before he left for the States. I showed him the picture of Masha Panchuk.

“Oh, sure, Masha worked as a maid here for a few weeks,” he said. “She was a sad girl. Pretty, but so sad she wore it like a coat.”

“She was close with Dravic?”

“I don’t know. I heard something,” he said. “Hang on a minute.” He disappeared into the hotel, and a few minutes later a stocky woman in a white skirt and dark blue blouse came out and hovered. She introduced herself as the assistant manager. I didn’t identify myself as a cop, but I implied this was some kind of official visit. The woman looked tense. Easy to intimidate.

“Sit down, please.” I said. “You knew Masha Panchuk, and Tito Dravic?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Miss Panchuk worked for a friend of mine,” I said. “In New York. I said I’d ask about her when I got here. They were close?”

“Yes,” said the woman who didn’t tell me her name, just her title. Yes, she said again and told me that Tito was upset when Masha went away. That Masha took up with a fellow, name of Zim something. “She told me she was going to Alaska with him. I told her she was mad, she had a good job here, but she didn’t take any notice.”

“Did Dravic know?”

“I imagine he knew, and not long after Masha left, he said he was going home to New York.”

“When was this?”

She shrugged. “Last winter perhaps?”

“You knew she was dead?”

“We heard. I am so sorry.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

She got up. “Do you speak Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me, if you would.”

I took a gulp of my coffee, glanced again at the middle-aged man in jeans—good-looking, expensive haircut, unlined face— and I followed her into the hotel and upstairs to a small office. She picked up the phone. A minute later, a young woman appeared. She wore a maid’s uniform, she was very young and pale and serious.

The manager spoke to her in bad Russian and gave her permission to answer my questions.

“You knew Masha Panchuk?” I said.

She nodded.

“And Dravic?”

“Yes.”

“They were close?”

“Yes,” she said, not volunteering more than she was asked for.

“Masha went away without him?”

“She gets married with Zim. Tito is unhappy. After a while he returns to the United States.”

“How unhappy?”

“Very unhappy and angry. I didn’t like to be near him,” the girl said. “One time I found him punching the wall with his fist until it is covered in blood.”

“And Masha?”

“I never saw her again.”

*

Masha was dead. Dravic was in Belgrade, refusing to talk to anyone, which was as good as dead.

Had Masha first gone to the Brooklyn club to get help from him? To tell him it was over with Zim? That she only used Zim to get to America?

It was a dead end. What I wanted was the son of a bitch who killed Valentina.

The manager told the Russian girl to go back to her work, then said to me, “Is your friend looking for someone to replace Masha Panchuk?”

“It’s for me,” I said. “I’m going to be living in London for a while and I need someone good.”

“You’d like a Russian girl?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t ask why, just made a phone call, wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

“This is the agency we used for Masha. They have good workers. They supply many of the important Russian families living here.”

“But you’re not Russian?”

“No, just plain English,” she said.

“A lot of Russians come to the hotel?”

“Yes,” she said. “We have a marvelous chef, two stars in Lyons before he came to us, absolute genius, and a very fine wine cellar and the Russians want only the best. Many come here to stay which is why we hire quite a few Russians as maids and waiters. Many of the wealthiest Russians have country estates quite close by. We cater parties for them, and the houses are marvelous, and the best art.”

“So it’s okay? You’re happy about it?”

“Of course we’re happy,” she said. “The Russians come and they are wonderful tippers. As long as it lasts,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“One of these days the whole thing will come crashing down.” She shifted her glance from me to the wall and back, and I realized she was not just uneasy, but on edge and maybe a little bit nuts.

Was she afraid of her world crashing? Of the Russians fleeing? Of the wave of money receding and leaving her stranded on some imaginary beach?

“How do you know?”

She looked up at the ceiling.

“I hear things,” she said, and I didn’t know if the woman meant God talked to her or she got messages through the fillings in her teeth or she eavesdropped on the Russians in the hotel.

“Can I trouble you for a light?” said the man in jeans when I got back to the terrace.

“Sure.” I handed him the gold lighter I had borrowed from Tolya. He shook a cigarette out of a pack and lit up, then handed the lighter back.

“Nice,” he said. “I noticed it earlier.”

“Right.”

“I was just wondering where you got it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve only seen one other lighter just like it. It belongs to Tolya Sverdloff.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“I’m Laurence Sverdloff,” he said, “Tolya’s cousin. It’s his lighter, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, and told him my name.

“You have another name, Mr Cohen?”

“Artie,” I said.

“In Russian you are Artemy Maximovich?”

“I’m not Russian,” I said. “But, yeah, once it was my name.”

“Good, yes, like Tolya told me,” he said. “Then it really is you. I’m sorry to make a fuss, but this horrible thing with Valentina. It makes you look in the rear-view mirror twice, you know?” His accent was neutral, stranded somewhere between America and England.

He was in his mid-forties, tall, wiry, and comfortable in his jeans and t-shirt, though I was guessing he was the kind of business guy who went everywhere first class as if he owned it. When he smiled, I saw the resemblance with Tolya.

“My real name is Laurence Sverdloff Antonovich” he said. “In America, they called me Larry,” he said. “Somebody picked this ridiculous name when I went to grad school at Stanford. God, I loved California. Name stuck. Whatever, but then Artie’s not much better,” he said, smiling, making his charm work hard for him. “Have you heard from my cousin?”

I didn’t answer. I wanted this Larry to fill the silence, tell me something.

“I bloody worry about what he’ll do to find out who killed Valentina. Nothing matters to him anymore except that. I wish you were with him.”

“He wanted me here.”

“He thinks it’s all about London,” said Larry.

“Is it? You could go to New York,” I said.

“It would make things worse. People watch where I go.”

“What people?”

He didn’t answer the question, just said, “Tolya and me, we grew up together, his father and mine were brothers. Both dead now,” said Larry, picking up his own lighter from the table as he reached for a cigarette. I’m afraid I only use my old Zippo.” He lit up. “I’m scared for him, when we were kids all I wanted was to be like him, my cousin Tolya, my idol, this daring guy. He had every illicit book under his bed, he was very rock and roll and for real. I wanted to call myself Ringo, but my father threatened to send me to the military academy, he said, we named you for the great British actor, and you want to call yourself for a what? A Beatle? So I gave in. I didn’t have Tolya’s balls.”

“I asked who’s watching you.”

“People who I offend,” he said, and went on to recount how his father had been a director, like Tolya’s.

“How’d you make the money?”

“You assume I have money?”

“Come on.”

“I went to Stanford, my English was already pretty good, made some money in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I played the game in Moscow. Made more. Back to California. So I go all the way to America, which I love, to marry an English girl who’s a doctor and wants to come home to work in the National Health Service here.”

I tapped my fingers. I wanted the meat and this guy was giving me the empty bun.

“I married a socialist.” He laughed. “What comes around, eh? You know my grandfather went to high school with Trotsky,” he added. “Seems like they were always fighting because grandpa’s pop was in the fur biz. Sable.”

“You’re not here by accident, are you?” I said to Larry.

“No,” he said. “I knew you were coming to London, Tolya told me, and before he left, he called and said I should keep an eye on you. I’m sorry for all the cloak and dagger stuff, but my driver saw you leave Tolya’s and head this way and he called me. Apologies, Artie.”

“How come you’re telling me all this?”

“So you’ll trust me,” he said. “What are you looking at?”

Just behind Larry, a guy with the square jaw and sloping shoulders of a piece of Russian muscle was hovering. Wanting to get into Larry’s eye line, to signal him, tell him it was time to get out of here, I figured. I mentioned it. Larry turned around, then got up from his chair and put some money on the table.