Londongrad (19 page)
He held up the newspaper. “You saw the story?” He gestured to a piece on Litvinenko. “The Brits are saying what everybody already knows, that this was an act of state terrorism. Now it’s official. I should go. Why don’t you ride with me, come have some lunch, if you want, or else my guy will take you back to London. His name is Pavel. He’s a good man, by the way.”
Half an hour later, we arrived at Larry Sverdloff’s house. There was a high black wrought-iron gate which opened as if somebody had been watching for us. Larry’s driver, Pavel, went through it, up a circular drive and parked in front of a long low-slung stone mansion. The sun had come out and it gave the stones a golden color.
We had come in the Merc—the Brits loved their cars, and gave them nicknames—with a Range Rover behind and in front. Through the narrow country lanes we had come like a military convoy. These Russians, Tolya, his cousin, others, used their drivers, their guys, like little armies. They used them as advance parties to protect them, spies to watch out for them, servants to do their bidding. Other things, too. Under his jacket, Pavel carried a gun.
I had a vision of them constantly in motion, driving around the countryside, through the London streets, the drivers reporting back to headquarters. England was a crowded little country, too many cars, too many drivers, too many cameras hanging from buildings and trees, like strange fruit.
From the front door of the house, a woman appeared. Larry greeted her in Russian, introduced me, we shook hands. Basha was her name, she said, and smiled. I saw in the way Larry Sverdloff talked to her, the way she used his first name, he played at being a benign laid-back guy. He was still in charge. The people who worked for him were modern-day serfs. Most were Russian. I was betting plenty of them were illegal. If they left him, where would they go?
Around the huge house were gardens planted thick with flowers, neon blue hydrangeas, purple iris, creamy roses. Ancient trees spread green shade over lawns. Beyond them I could see huge vistas of green, more trees, a lake glittering in the distance. I could see how jealous Tolya would have been. His cousin was a player with a castle and the courtiers to go with it.
“Shall we swim?” said Larry.
He lent me a suit, I changed in a pool house, and for a while we swam silently.
A powerful swimmer, Larry was clearly a guy who worked out, wiry, compact, big shoulders, no fat at all. Without agreeing, we raced the length of the pool and back, and I knew he expected to win. I let him win. A happy opponent was useful, though there was no reason to figure Larry Sverdloff for the opposition.
Afterwards, he tossed me a thick blue towel, and used another one to dry his hair. Basha, the housekeeper appeared with a tray of sandwiches and drinks. Larry took a can of Diet Coke, popped the top and drank it. Somewhere a bird tweeted in a tree.
“You think this is all nuts, somebody like me riding around in that tank of an SUV? Living in this place?” said Larry.
“Is it?”
“Fuck knows,” said Larry, smiling suddenly like a regular guy who found himself in an unexpected, almost ridiculous situation.
“You’ve seen a lot of Tolya the last few years?”
“Yes,” he said. “He never mentions me?”
“No.”
“He probably doesn’t want to involve you,” said Larry.
“What in?”
“His business. My business.”
“He told you that?” I took a beer.
“He doesn’t have to. He talks about you a lot, I know how he feels.”
“What’s his business?”
“Whatever he can get.”
I drank from the bottle. “What’s that mean?” I said.
“Look, when we were kids in Moscow, he could always get books, or jeans, or go up to Tallinn to a flea market and come back with Pierre Cardin sunglasses. He would wear those sunglasses and imagine he was somewhere else. The glasses invested him with his own kind of power. They were magic glasses, he always told me. I believed him. ”
“And now?”
“He thinks he’s still a rock and roll hero except now his music is the money.”
“So?”
“He shoots his mouth off,” Larry said. “People think he’s a wild man.”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Think he’s a loose cannon?”
Larry looked up. Clouds, ominous fat purple clouds scrambled across the sky and thunder rumbled through the humid afternoon. I followed his gaze, and saw him glance in the direction of the house.
“Ten years ago I was living in a nice little suburban place outside Palo Alto,” he said.
“Yeah, so what made you give it up, I mean other than your wife wanted to live in England?”
“Greed,” he said. “At first.”
“And second?”
“You probably want to know about Valentina. I loved Val,”
he said, “I was her uncle and her godfather.”
“What about the boyfriend? Greg.”
“I met him at a party. He seemed fine. Val was crazy about him.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“I’ll try to help.”
Larry’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened, got up, a towel still around his neck.
“I want to get back to London,” I said.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I don’t like the country.”
“Right,” he said. “I’ll try to get hold of Greg for you. Meanwhile I’ll give you a phone number. You might need help, right?” He said it straight, it wasn’t ironic, not sarcastic, just a statement of fact. “Come up to the house,” Larry added. “You can shower and change. I have an office out here, I do a lot of my business instead of my main office in London,” he said. “It’s easier, safer, and I’ve discovered most people are willing to make the trip.”
“I bet.”
He shrugged. “If they want something, they come. I might be able to give you something that will help. My driver can take you back to London later,” said Larry, who didn’t wait for my answer.
Larry Sverdloff’s office was in a free-standing building in back of the house, out of view of the gardens, or the beautiful rooms I had glimpsed on my way to shower and change.
In a room next to the office were two sofas and an armchair and in them sat five men, leaning forward, waiting, a little anxious.
A couple of them were Russians in open-necked shirts. The three Brits sat straight, they were tense, they looked like supplicants, like people who wanted something, needed something from Larry Sverdloff.
When I came in, they looked up expectantly, then went back to staring at their hands. A woman who said she was Larry’s assistant came out of his office, greeted me and asked me to wait.
“He’ll only be a minute,” she said.
Through the window I could see cars in a parking area, could see one leave, another arrive. I got the sense Larry wanted me to see all this, wanted me to understand his power, his authority.
After a few minutes, Larry came out and said, “Hi, Art, God, I’m sorry I was late. Come in.”
We started for his office, the men who were waiting got up and greeted him. He shook their hands. There was no trace of irony on his face, no glimpse at all of the guy I had been swimming with an hour earlier.
He was comfortable with the power he had over the men in his outer office.
On the wall in Larry’s own office was a huge Matisse, a thing so beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking. Larry followed my gaze, but he didn’t speak, and then from his pocket he got a scrap of paper with a number. “This is somebody you could call if you want help, use my name, okay? It’s a good contact, and safe,” he said.
I was impatient with all of it suddenly. I stayed on my feet.
“Don’t you want to sit, Artie?”
“I’m fine. What’s so fucking hush-hush?”
“Yeah, okay, I was holding back, but I realized if you’re going to find who killed Val and who wants Tolya dead, there are things you should know. Please sit down, it will take a while,” said Larry, glancing out of the window.
“Sure,” I said, sitting on a worn leather chair. “You keep looking around, you ride in an armored car, I don’t get it.”
“You don’t believe it’s necessary?”
“This is England. They don’t even carry guns here. It feels like a lot’s going on for show.”
“You mean you think it’s posturing, that I do all this stuff to show people I have power?”
“You want an answer?”
“Sure.”
“Yes. I mean, what’s it for? You think you’re in so much danger? Come on,” I said.
“They killed Valentina.”
“In New York.”
“They killed Litvinenko. There have been others. I’ve had threats. Even my kids. I try to keep it normal for them, I don’t want them going to school with guys carrying loaded AKs, like some people.”
“Jesus.”
“No matter where I go, I can’t get away, here, California, vacation, it doesn’t matter.”
“Because you owe somebody?”
He smiled just slightly. “Because of who I am.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m a Russian. Like Tolya, like you.”
“No fucking chance,” I said under my breath.
Larry got up and looked out of the window, turned back to me but didn’t sit down.
“You can’t escape from it,” he said. “The religion, the politics, the KGB, FSB, the Kremlin, the power, the paranoia, the fear, the fact that until a century ago most of us were serfs, slaves, really, we didn’t even have last names, all surreal, the fact that thirty-seven per cent of the population can’t see the need for indoor plumbing, that men are dying younger and younger, that we’ve produced the most sophisticated music and literature and graphics in the past, and we’re living in the Middle Ages, and we shoot journalists who tell the truth. It’s getting worse.” In Larry’s face was something I hadn’t seen before, a kind of passion, or was it obsession?
“I thought you were a businessman, I thought you were in it for the dough.”
“There will be a lot of shit coming,” Larry said. “Soon. Soon, Artie, they want Georgia, they want Ukraine, I’m betting before the end of the summer, there will be tanks in Tblisi, Art, and nobody will know if it’s a response to the Georgians or if the Georgians wanted it, provoked it. People will take sides, they’ll rattle nukes. There’s only one power and it takes in the whole damn place, the whole former USSR, you get it? You want me to spell it out, you want me to write the name?”
“Sure. I’m only a New York cop, help me out.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper, and said, “Everything comes from the Kremlin,” he said. “Everything goes back to Putin.”
“What does it have to do with Val?”
“Tolya,” he said. “Maybe me. A warning.”
“You have people on it?”
“I have official friends. The number I gave you is one of them, somebody who can help you with Valentina. Use it.”
“Official?”
“I don’t operate like my cousin, I do this stuff inside the system. It works better. And we’ll find them, whoever killed her, the way we found out who killed Sasha Litvinenko.”
“Who?”
“Name is Lugovoi. Maybe you read about it. He’s in Russia, no extradition. They’ll protect him, but nothing is forever.”
“Who’s we? I don’t believe the bullshit about it all being official. There’s other people.”
“You don’t need them,” he said.
“Can you fix for me to meet this guy, Greg?”
“There’s a party tomorrow night. Maybe he’ll be there. Charity thing Tolya cooked up. It would have been for Val, now it will be in her honor,” he said, and his eyes filled up. I couldn’t tell if he was acting or not. “Call me anytime. But be careful.”
“What of?”
“There are people like me here who want things to change in Russia, you know their names, these are people who are in much worse danger, they go on TV, they give interviews, they never travel without whole armies of security.” Larry sat close to me now, and leaned forward. “This is where we put our money, this is what we work for, to make it better in Russia, to stop all this. This is why it’s dangerous.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, impatient now.
Larry got up. “The next revolution, Art. I have to go now. See you at the party tomorrow night.”
“Watch it, mate,” said a fat man who pushed past me on the street in London.
Fuck off, mate, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. By the time I got back to London from Larry Sverdloff’s place, it was a dripping day, wet, warm. I looked at the number on the door of a Greek grocery store on Moscow Road. I was looking for the agency where Masha Panchuk had been hired to work at the country hotel.
People looked pissed off, they snapped if you bumped into the them, in the stores they were surly. London had become a mean place since I’d been here a dozen years ago. Maybe it always was.
“Bloody London,” I said half aloud. It was what I had felt even then. It was a city that got to me, made me half fall in love with it, then shoved me away, snarling.
In a row of little stores, electrical appliances, laundromat, coffee place, I found the building and rang the bell. Somebody buzzed me in, and I climbed three flights.
“Maids, Butlers, Chauffeurs” the printed sign read in English. Under it, on a piece of cardboard, the same sign was written out by hand in Russian. The door was open.
A middle-aged woman with a kindly face and a hairy wart on her cheek was singing a Russian lullaby to the plants she was watering on the windowsill. Turned when I entered, said her name was Ilana. On the other side of the room was a second door. I figured it led to a bathroom.
“Please, sit down,” said Ilana, taking the chair behind a desk that held only a calendar and an old desktop computer.
I repeated what I’d said at the hotel in the countryside that I was looking for somebody to take care of me in London. I didn’t mention Masha Panchuk, not at first, and I didn’t know if the hotel had called Ilana. She pulled her computer screen towards me so we could both see it and then scrolled through pictures.
I made conversation. On a hunch, I switched to Russian. She smiled. I reflected on the humor in the street where the agency was being called Moscow Road. There was some history here, she added. Aristocrats had lived here; just around the corner in St Petersburg Mews, too. Russian businesses had opened over the years, she said, because it was close to Paddington Station where the train from the airport came in, and close to the Russian Embassy if you needed visas for your workers; and so people clustered around it, and after a while it had become a little joke.