Londongrad (29 page)
“How good?”
“Good enough. It’s fine. You don’t need to know anything else about it, just stay here, Artie, okay? Just stay until we know it’s okay for you to go home to New York.”
“Until when?”
“Until I call you. I’m on your side, you know.”
I stayed overnight at Larry’s. I swam in his pool. I tried to sleep. I knew that Tolya had followed Grisha Curtis to Moscow. But I had seen the look on his face when I told him I thought Curtis had killed Valentina and had then gone to Moscow. Tolya had nothing else to lose, I knew if he found Grisha, he would hurt him, or kill him.
In spite of what Larry said, I had to know. I tried Tolya on half a dozen numbers. For two days, I worked the phone. But he had vanished.
It was true, I was in bad fucking trouble, my prints on a gun I had used in London. My prints all over Valentina’s room. My pictures were in her room, or had been.
I thought about calling Fiona. I knew I was on the edge, dancing at the very edge of an open manhole cover and I could fall into the sewer. Fiona Colquhoun had access and I trusted her, more or less. I gave it one more day. For one day, I’d go quiet. Maybe two.
I stopped answering e-mails. I turned off my cellphone. I bought a pay-as-you-go phone and gave Fiona the number but nobody else.
Stay out of London, she said. I felt crazy from waiting. I swam in Larry’s pool, I swam so much, my skin wrinkled. In a shop in the little village near Larry Sverdloff’s house, I picked up a couple of books, one or two spy novels, and sat in the pub reading, drinking a little beer, keeping to myself.
In spy novels, in the Bourne movies, that kind of stuff, guys always leave false traces; they use different names; they have extra passports and money in Swiss banks.
I thought about moving into some remote hotel, but they’d ask for my passport. At night I went through the papers I had taken from Grisha’s office, following the dates, the e-mails, working out when he had been in America.
By Wednesday, two days after I’d seen Tolya, I was going nuts. The weather had turned hot and outside the pub, a couple of boys kicked a football around. I walked back to Larry’s, and on the way I called Fiona Colquhoun from a public payphone. From inside the red box I watched an old lady bicycle past.
Fiona told me to wait for her near the village post office, and half an hour later, her green Mini pulled up.
“Grisha Curtis is gone, we think he’s in Russia, as you probably guessed” she said. “The last we have on him is his buying a ticket. We don’t know if he boarded the plane, but we have to assume it. We have our people in Moscow on it. You always believed he killed Valentina Sverdloff?”
“Yes.”
“But now you’re sure.”
“Yes. He hired a thug to do it who messed up and killed another girl, Masha, and when Grisha saw how he butchered her, he had to kill Valentina himself. He couldn’t stand the idea of Val ending up like Masha, wrapped in duct tape, left in a playground.”
“I got you a visa.”
“Thank you.”
“I assumed you’d want to go.”
“Thanks. I know that Tolya Sverdloff thinks he was poisoned, like Litvinenko, he thinks his daughter was also poisoned. Something is wrong with him, but not this. I need to convince him. This is your subject,” I said. “Help me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and I told her about the thug Terenti they’d picked up in New York for Masha Panchuk’s murder. “I’m guessing he beat me up the other night, too.”
“We can’t find him,” she said. “It’s a bloody can of worms.”
“Yes.”
Handing me an envelope, she said, “Your visa. This should get you out of here and into Moscow.”
“You knew?”
“I knew you’d try to go, and if you have to go to Moscow, and I know you will, do at least pretend you’re an American tourist with an interest in Russian culture. When you get there, use a different name, at least for a bit, try to stay safe,” said Fiona, putting her hand on my shoulder. “These days I can’t help you over there, Artie. We Brits are not in good odor. If there’s trouble in Georgia, which is what I’m hearing from the chatter, they won’t be in love with Americans, either,” she said. “I wish to God you wouldn’t go at all, but you will, and this is the best I can do for you this end.”
“You’ll let me know what you find out?”
“If I can.”
“In that case, lunch when I get back,” I said. “I’ll bring the wine. I like your hat.”
“I got it in Israel,” she said. “Did you know there are an awful lot of Russians there now, Tel Aviv’s a bit like a Russian colony by the sea. No matter, I’m glad you like my hat. And, Artie?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t for God’s sake take the bloody gun with you. And don’t try buying one in Moscow.”
“You have me pegged as some kind of gunslinger, or what? You think I’m Dirty Harry?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
I thought about it. I had never liked guns, but all the years I’d been a cop, they had become a kind of body part.
“I hear you,” I said. “And I don’t love guns.”
Her mouth turned up in a smile.
“I wouldn’t blame you, considering the scum we’re dealing with, but it’s about your safety. If you’re caught with a weapon in Moscow, they won’t be nearly as nice as I am,” said Fiona. “You were wondering, I imagine, what my relationship is with Larry Sverdloff?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Good,” she said. “Don’t think about it. He’s helped me, leave it at that,” she said, and suddenly I felt just a flicker of jealousy.
“What else?” I said, getting up from the bench. As Fiona got up, too, I realized she was as tall as me.
“Don’t pick your toes in Pushkin Square,” she added, and we both laughed and exchanged banter about our favorite old movies, especially comedies.
“God, don’t you wish life was like that?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “More comedy would be great.”
For a few more minutes we chatted about movies, and the weather, and her daughter, unwilling to part, sensing it could be our last conversation.
Fiona adjusted her straw hat so it shaded the gray eyes, pushed her thick dark hair away from her face, and said, “I can get you to Russia, but please try to make yourself invisible, they’ll be watching you.”
“Who?”
“In Moscow? Everyone.”
As soon as I’d put my bag in the overhead luggage rack and sat down on the airport bus into Moscow, a gang of teenagers in pink t-shirts crowded around me, like something out of
Lord
of the Flies
, except that they were pretty girls, nice girls, who wanted only to recount the great time they’d had at camp near Sochi on the Black Sea.
The little girls swarmed me. Giggling, chattering, clutching their backpacks and books and fashion magazines, they flopped onto the remaining free seats near me in the back. The little ones, who looked about eight or nine, had sticky faces from the candy they were cramming into their mouths, and it was smeared on their dolls and stuffed animals, including an immense white plush bear. I helped its owner stash it in the overhead rack.
The older girls, thirteen, fourteen, kept track of the younger children; acting as chaperones they made sure the little ones were in their seats, then the teenagers sat and began to gossip to each other. At first a few complained about taking the regular airport bus. The plane had been late. The private bus intended for them had not appeared.
All of them wore the candy pink t-shirts that read I ♥ Putin, except for one whose logo read IF NOT HIM, WHO? Medvedev had been president for two months, one girl said, but everyone knew that Putin was the man who mattered.
The girl closest to me—she was about fourteen—looked at me with interest and asked me in Russian where I was from, In English, I said that I didn’t speak the language.
“You are from where, sir?” she said in English, and told me her name was Kim. I said New York City, and she grinned and looked excited and tapped her pal on the shoulder and told her that New York was wonderful and not at all like the rest of America, and the shopping downtown, Broadway, the things you can get, the designer bags, the shoes at Steve Madden, and the cute boys! She had been with her aunt twice, and, oh, New York, she said again, gabbling, running her words together, excited, practically jumping up and down.
Kim, the leader, the spokeswoman for the gang of girls, took charge. Camp had been fun, they said, with Kim as a translator. She explained that at camp they swam in the sea and camped under the stars, they had athletics, games, dramatics— she had been the star of an entire play they’d written and produced by themselves.
So many kids were going to camp these days, she noted, and the girls giggled when she described the Love Tents at a place on Lake Seliger. More for poor young people, of course, said Kim. At the Love Tents, she said again, older teenagers were encouraged to make babies for the fatherland.
The girls giggled some more.
I want four children, said one girl.
Suddenly, all the girls were talking at the same time. I pretended not to understand anything, waiting until Kim translated. The talk was of boys.
I would marry Vladimir Vladimirovich, said one of the girls, I would like this type of man we have for our leader. I would like one similar to him for a husband.
“You admire Mr Putin, sir?” said Kim, the English-speaker. “It is right word, admire?”
I didn’t answer right away, and another girl said in Russian, “He is American. He does not understand.” Nobody translated this. “Americans think they run the world, they think we are just a dumb old-fashioned country.”
I ignored her, pretending I couldn’t understand, and said I was a tourist and a travel writer. I was in Moscow to see the sights, the Kremlin, the museums, the churches.
I asked for their advice; they told me about Novodevichy, the convent and the cemetery, they mentioned Gorky Park, the museums, too, and the metro. The subway, said Kim, translating, was the most beautiful in the world. And the best ice cream, of course.
I listened. I thought about Grisha Curtis. I had come to Moscow to hunt him down. I knew Tolya would already be on his trail, and I had to get there first.
I didn’t want Tolya killing Grisha. I didn’t want Tolya in harm’s way. He hadn’t left me any messages, I didn’t know where he was, I figured he was here, someplace, in this vast sprawl of a city where I grew up and where once I knew my way around every back alley. I looked through the glass, the flat countryside, the suburbs, the endless billboards passed. We got closer to Moscow. The bus slowed. The traffic slowed up, roads clogged, then gridlock.
I was glad to be out of London. Mrs Curtis was dead, maybe because she had talked to me. Would her own son kill her for that? The rich cousin who lived on Eaton Square? I had left a trail of death spreading behind me like an infection.
“Tell him about St Saviour,” said another girl on the bus, and Kim told me about the beautiful cathedral, most beautiful in the world, she said, that had been a swimming pool, and which had been restored so beautifully, so much gold, she said.
I said, to make them talk more, fill me in on this new Moscow—it was seventeen years since I’d been back—and that I admired Russian culture very much. They asked me what I did exactly. I said I was doing research for my new book and also on vacation, and hoped my answer would be good enough, but they were observant kids.
“But you are doing what? In your real life?” asked Kim.
My real life?
Again, I said I was a travel writer, and I wrote books and an online blog about foreign places. They told me the best writers were in Russia, and then one of them offered me a candy bar, explaining Red October produced delicious chocolates, Russian chocolates.
She held out an Alionka bar. On the wrapper was the familiar picture of a rosy-cheeked little girl in a baby babushka, the tiny headscarf tied under her chin.
I unwrapped it slowly. The smell rose up. The same smell of the same chocolate my father had brought home for me every week in his leather briefcase, and now the girls on the bus said: taste it.
Breaking off a piece, I ate it, pretended it was a delightful new treat, something I’d never tasted, and the girls all said, eat some more, eat it all, we have enough, come on, as if it were a competition, a way to rate me, and I bit into the chocolate again, nodding and smiling for their benefit. When I looked out of the window, I saw my father.
I pushed my face against the window. Traffic bumper to bumper. Crowds on the street. Neon. Billboards. Shops. A city I hardly knew, and then I saw him just near Lubyanka Square, the KGB headquarters where he had his office when I was a kid.
The huge yellow stone building, where the statue of the founder of the Russian secret police was “hanged” when communism collapsed, hanged, hauled away. I always loved meeting my dad there because the KGB was next to Detsky Mir, Kids’ World, the greatest toy shop on earth, it had seemed then. I remembered. Lubyanka, with its terrifying jail, was sometimes joked about and in private called “Adults’ World”.
I saw my dad, walking along, perhaps heading to his office, swinging his good American leather briefcase in which he brought home my chocolates.
Alionka had been my favorite of all the sweets he brought home—cranberries in sugar, a chocolate rabbit for New Year’s, Stolichnaya with the same label as the vodka and vodka inside the candies.
Outside the window, the evening sun lit him up, as he dodged traffic, and jogged gracefully across the street, carrying the briefcase he had brought home from America, which he polished every night at the kitchen table.
You think it smells of America, my mother always said a little dismissively, but he was proud of it because other officers carried satchels made out of East German leather, or even cardboard. On my father’s fine leather case was a label that read Mark Cross.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when my father was a young hero of the KGB, times were good, he always said. Khrushchev times, when you could honorably defend your country, and people felt good about doing it, or some of them did. Things were changing. Sputnik went up in l957 and we were full of ourselves, we Soviets, and then Yuri Gagarin. They had believed, some of them, we would see the great days of real socialism, that we would rule the world in a just way.