Londongrad (3 page)

“Please, come back, Artemy,” she said. “And tell Valentina to come.” She kissed my cheek, papery lips against my skin, and handed me a box of chocolates, which she had wrapped carefully with fancy gold paper and a red ribbon. “For Mr Sverdloff who sends me the books. You’ll give this to him?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Tell Valentina I miss her, please.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

She shook her head. “But maybe I will call you for help with some of my neighbors. They are afraid.”

“Of the muggings?”

“Of everything, crime, black people, of the new kind of Russians, of anything different, of a feeling that they may have to move again, or leave America. Most are legal, but they are afraid. They pull down their blinds and pray to God,” she added. “Except God isn’t listening. So some of us fight instead. We fight landlords. We remember how to fight. Goodbye, again, Artemy.”

As I walked along the corridor of Dimitriovna’s floor, I could hear classical music from behind the doors. Doors opened a crack, mostly old people looking out to see who it was, and if it was safe, and seeing other tenants looking out of their apartments, greeted each other in Russian, and fixed social arrangements for cards and tea. One elderly man held the door open long enough to take a good look at me.

“Who are you?” he said in English with a thick accent. “What do you want?” He was angry, I could see he felt I was some kind of interloper, somebody without any real business up here. Maybe he figured me for a developer.

Decades back, these high-rise towers had been built to house immigrants, forty bucks per room back then. They were almost trashed in the 1980s by gangs and guns, and people bolted their doors and rarely went out.

Now the crack dealer creeps had gone the place was threatened instead by Trump, or some other feral developer: take it over, raise the rents, blow it up, co-op it. Looked like by fall the deal would be done.

But Olga Dimitriovna and her friends weren’t going to budge easy, not without a fight, not after they’d made a life, a village up on the sixteenth floor, the old-timers helping the new ones, everybody in and out of each other’s apartments, sitting out on nice days on green and yellow plastic deckchairs, as if the sidewalk in front was a front porch; or making trips over to Brighton Beach to shop or eat on special occasions or maybe to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for music once a year.

They would resist. They would organize. If necessary, they would fight. They had survived everything else. Stalin, Hitler. Coming to America.

But even here, thousands of miles from Moscow, people were paranoid. Russia was hot as hell, in several senses, and now Putin was rattling his nukes, and people were secretly thinking: will America bend to these people? Will they cut off the stream of Russian immigrants? Will they listen to Lou Dobbs, the asshole on CNN who rants about immigrants every night? Even Russians with American passports, think: will I have to move again? Where will I go?

Near the elevator, I turned on my cellphone.

“Who is it?” I said, but the signal was dead.

I banged on the elevator door. Where was it?

Some of the tenants reappeared in the hall and watched until the elevator came and I went away. Ingrained in them was a deep suspicion, even hatred, of cops. Somehow they knew I was a cop, or suspected it. I realized I was still carrying the fancy box of chocolates and in the heat, I could smell them. I got into the elevator, feeling somebody was on my back. I opened the chocolates. I ate one. It had a nut in it.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was still holding the chocolates when I left the building, and as I got to my car, I thought I saw the kid, the Russian girl, Dina.

“Hey!”

I ran after her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was the hot sun in my eyes. I ran until my lungs burned. I caught her near a wire fence that divided the street from a water-plant facility, and a stretch of filthy beach.

When she saw me, she stopped. She hadn’t been running away from me.

“Why were you running?”

“I was looking for somebody,” she said in Russian.

“Who?”

“Nobody.”

We were outside a broken-down housing project. Some of the little yellow tiles had fallen off the façade, like scabs off a half-healed wound.

“You live here?”

She shrugged.

“You want to tell me something?”

“Yes.”

I looked at her. “You’re hungry?”

She nodded and I took her into a bodega on the other side of the street and bought her a ham sandwich and a Coke and a bag of Fritos and watched her eat all of it without stopping. I wondered when she had her last meal. All the time I was with her, she stared at the box of chocolate. I gave it to her. She shoved the candy into her mouth.

“Where do you live? Will you show me?”

“I have something,” said Dina, clutching her fist shut.

“Show me.”

When she opened her hand, she had a thin silver chain with a blue ceramic evil-eye charm in light blue and white.

“Where did you get this?”

“In the playground,” she said.

I waited.

“Will you give me money for it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were like a desperate little animal.

“Why should I?”

“I got it from the playground. I got it near the swing.”

“You took it from her?”

“No. I picked it up.”

“How much?”

“One hundred.”

“No way,” I said in Russian. “No deal.”

“Fifty.” She was tiny and hungry and scared and an easy mark. The necklace wasn’t worth five bucks.

“I’ll give you twenty-five,” I said and she lit up like somebody had turned a switch.

I gave her some bills with one hand while I called a friend, a good female cop I know who would come and help me get the kid to a safe place.

“I want to go home,” she said.

I held on to her as best I could, but as soon as she felt me loosen my grip—I couldn’t handcuff her or anything—she broke away, same as earlier, just broke free and ran like hell and disappeared among the broken buildings.

*

“Artie?” It was Bobo Leven, the detective who had answered the call on the playground case. He was leaning against the jungle gym smoking. I looked at the swings. The body was gone.

“Yeah, hi, Bobo.”

“You got my message?”

“I got it. I’m in a hurry, so what do you need?”

“Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. Bobo looked anxious. “You’ll do the case fine, Bobo, you’ll make your name with it.”

His real name was Boris Borisovich Leven, but everyone called him Bobo. He was twenty-eight and smart as hell, having finished Brooklyn College in three years instead of four, followed by his MA at John Jay in criminology. He was still living at home these days, out on Brighton Beach with his parents.

And he knew the Russkis out there as well as anyone in the city, including me. Also, his mother, who ran a little export-import business from the house—Russian embroidery, varnished boxes, cheap porcelain, that kind of shit—went back and forth a lot, so he had a handle on what was doing over there. Bobo had cousins every place: LA, London, Miami, Los Angeles, Moscow, Tel Aviv.

At six four, with the kind of long springy muscles you get if you work out right, he played good basketball. He had an accent, but he was a handsome kid with nice manners, and when I needed a favor, he was always ready.

I had worked with Bobo Leven a few times. And once, I took him out drinking with a couple of the guys, and he loved the tribal aspect of it, the fact you could say things you couldn’t say to anyone else in language you could never divulge to civilians. He knew there were things that only other guys on the job understood. They liked him okay. But one of my oldest friends said to me, “He looks nice, he acts respectful, but I don’t trust him much.”

*

A couple of hazmat guys, white paper suits, yellow rubber boots, showed up and started working over the playground, taking samples of dirt, looking at their Geiger counters, whispering to each other through their masks, and Bobo, seeing them, looked nervous.

“What are they here for?”

One of the guys removed his mask and I recognized him from a job I did once. Couldn’t remember his name, and he was older and heavier, but the face was the same. I went over and talked to him out of Bobo’s hearing. I didn’t want him getting in the way. The wind puffed out the papery white hazmat suit.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody thought the scene could be hot,” said Tom Alvin, name on his badge. “They always think a scene is hot, you know, man, I mean, it’s an obsession, they find a case, they send us in, and what the fuck difference does it make, you know? They’re consumed, man, with the idea of a dirty bomb. They read too much shit in the papers, you know, like that spy thing over in England, what was his name, the Russian dude that got poisoned? You heard about that? Some kind of radiation shit, but it was like a couple of years ago. Man, we better all pray McCain gets elected, he’s like a regular fucking war hero and if we get trouble, he’s the guy.” He paused. “You wanna know what they should do?”

“What’s that?”

“They should stop seeing movies that got nothing to do with what’s going on, all them big thrillers with nuclear shit in them, and worth nothing, nada, zero. They should spend some money inspecting container ships, and the baggage holds of all those aircraft from crazy places, how about hospital waste, how about them nuke plants that got no controls? But we don’t got no money for that, right, man? It’s coming, but not like this in some fucking playground, or in somebody’s sushi like the guy in London. One day, it’ll just come outta the sky, bang, like the Trade Center, bing bang boom!” He snorted, threw his smoke on the ground, crushed it with his foot and put his mask back on. “Artie, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You working this?”

“No, just passing by.”

“Didn’t you work a nuke case way back in the day, out by Brighton Beach? You tracked some nuke mule who carried stuff out of Russia in his suitcase? I remember that. With some of those fucking Russkis, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So you think you got something here?” I gestured at the swing.

“I’m not sure. You want me to give you a call?”

I nodded in Bobo’s direction. “Call him, if you want.”

“What did the hazmat guy say?” Bobo asked.

“Give him your number, he’ll call you.”

“So would you work this with me, Artie?”

I told him I was seriously on vacation.

“I can call you for some advice?” He was polite, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this guy. Maybe all he wanted was to do the case right, but there was something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to get away.

“Or maybe we could have a beer together once in a while and I could talk through it with you?”

“Sure,” I said, and headed for the street, Bobo following me, scribbling in his notebook fast as he could write.

Outside the playground, I leaned against Bobo’s red Audi TT and wondered how he could afford it.

“Nice car,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“So what do you think?” said Bobo, dragging in smoke the way only a Russian guy can do it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me either. I mean, Artie, you been on the job all this time, and who the fuck tapes up some poor girl and leaves her to suffocate in this shitty place?”

“I don’t know, Bobo, I don’t know who likes making people feel pain.”

“You’re wondering if they taped her up before she was dead?” said Bobo.

“I have to go,” I said. “Keep in touch.”

“A guy once told me once you get close to a case, you can’t let go, isn’t that right? Artie?”

“He was probably drunk,” I said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Stacks of pink cold cuts lay on trays, little mountains of cubed cheese, orange, yellow, white, carrot sticks, candy bars, bagels, rolls, pastries that glistened, shiny under the lights, were arranged on platters, and NYPD guys in uniform were gobbling up food as fast as they could, as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, shoving food into their mouths, piling it high on paper plates. The long tables were set up outside the sound stage.

“Craft Services, they call it,” said Sonny Lippert, my ex-boss, when I found him at the Steiner Movie Studios where the old Brooklyn Shipyards had been.

He picked up his plate and sauntered out into the courtyard, and I followed him. He sat on a canvas directors’ chair and gestured to another one. I sat next to him.

I wanted his advice before I saw Bobo Leven again. The dead girl wasn’t my case, it was Leven’s, but I couldn’t let it go. The image of the girl on the swing stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. Some guy had told Leven when I got close to a case I couldn’t let it go, but that was crap. I was happy to turn it over to Leven. I was curious was all. I had seen the girl on the swing first and I was curious.

Or was I fooling myself? Had I become some kind of obsessive, one of those cops who can’t get the smell of a homicide out of his nose?

It wasn’t that I planned to work the case, I only wanted advice. Any information I got I’d pass on. Anyhow, I owed Sonny Lippert a visit. I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

“So, Artie, good to see you, it’s been a while,” said Sonny, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, the kind of dress blues guys wore to funerals. I had never in my life seen Lippert dressed as a cop. Almost all the years I’d known him, it was after he left the police force to work as a US attorney.

“What’s with the outfit?” I said to Lippert who had been my boss on and off for years until he retired.

“Nifty, right,” said Sonny, smoothing his navy blue jacket. “Fits me nice, right? I sucked up to the wardrobe lady, man. These people are cool. Listen, man, you want to go hear Ahmad Jamal with me in the fall, one of the last of the greats, man?” he said.

Long ago Sonny and me had started listening to music together. He still calls everyone “man”, a leftover from his younger years when he hung out with jazz guys. He still listened to the music with real love.