Londongrad (41 page)
And then I saw the horse. A girl rode the animal bareback, pressing her heels against its side, leaning forward to cling to its neck, stroking its mane, galloping across the square, laughing, hair streaming out behind her, skirt billowing in the evening breeze, as she headed for Resurrection Gate. And people looking began to laugh and cheer and blow her kisses. Somebody started an old Russian song and the others joined in. Even a couple of cops laughed before they chased her away.
Smiling, Bounine tossed his American Express card on the table, to pay for dinner, and the drinks. It was a Platinum card. And it was as if the gesture, the tossing it on the table, included me as if he could charge me on his Amex card.
It occurred to me in the pleasant cafe, surrounded by civilized people, savoring good wine, enjoying dinner, laughing merrily at the girl on the horse, that maybe this was how they did it now, maybe now everything was only about money, even spooks charged their thugs and hands-for-hire to American Express.
Bounine followed my gaze. “You’re not imagining it,” he said kindly. “It really is a horse. You see that at night in Moscow.”
I put my coffee cup down.
He took a little sip of the armagnac, held it to the light with satisfaction and said softly, “You’ll help us, then, won’t you, Artie?”
Turn the page for a sneak preview of Reggie Nadelson’s new Artie Cohen mystery,
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Mid-December 2008. Barack Obama has just been elected; all of New York is ecstatic, especially Harlem—as detective Artie Cohen witnesses. On a freezing night a few weeks after the election, Artie gets a late call from his ex-girlfriend Lily Hanes, begging for his help. Lily has been living at the Louis Armstrong Apartments, one of Harlem’s great buildings in the legendary neighborhood of Sugar Hill, while working on Obama’s campaign. Now her Russian neighbor, Marianna Simonova, has died; Lily fears she’s at fault and needs Artie’s Russian connections. Over a weekend when the city is locked in by snow and cold, with the financial markets tanking, one after another people at the Armstrong die. Artie, out of his element, a white detective in a black world, is drawn inexorably into the realm of Sugar Hill, where almost everybody except for the real estate developers seems locked in the past. Working to solve the murders, Artie tries desperately to win Lily back.
Blood Count
is a murder mystery and a tale about New York, race, property, money, and music, with an ending one could never predict.
The new Artie Cohen mystery by Reggie Nadelson
B
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Walker & Company
Available wherever books are sold
W
ho died?”
The night when I finished a case, closed it up, got the creep who killed pigeons in the park for pleasure—and the homeless guys who liked to feed them—I went to bed early, spent a luxurious hour in the sack drinking beer and watching a rerun of the Yanks’ 2000 World Series win on TV.
As I tipped over into sleep, I realized I’d forgotten to turn off my phone. When it rang a few hours later, still mostly asleep, I ignored it, until the voice on the answering machine crashed into my semiconscious brain.
“We got a dead Russian. Get yourself over here,” said the voice, and I wasn’t sure at first if it was real or I was trapped in that nightmare where you’re buried alive, pushing up on the coffin lid, hearing a phone ring, unable to get to it.
At the foot of the bed, the TV was still on—pictures of Obama in Chicago—and I realized I was safe at home in downtown Manhattan, and then the phone rang again. It was only Sonny Lippert.
“Who died, Sonny?” I was pissed off.
“Didn’t you get my message? I told you, a Russian,” he said. “Get your ass over here, man.”
“Not now.”
“Now,” he said. “Right now. My place.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Listen. Friend of mine uptown in Harlem, he needs some help, right? One of his detectives found a dead guy up in his precinct with some kind of Russian document stuck to him, skewered with a knife, like a shish kabob. He’s asking can I get it translated. Asked if I could call you.”
“Where is it?”
“What?”
“This document?”
“I have it.”
“So fax it over.”
“I want to do this in person,” said Sonny, and suddenly I knew he was lonely and wanted company.
“He’s white?”
“Who?”
“The dead guy.”
“Why?”
“You mentioned Harlem.”
“I told you, man, he’s Russian. Probably Russian.”
Still naked, I went and looked out the window and saw the light on in Mike Rizzi’s coffee shop. “I’ll buy you coffee, okay? Rizzi’s place,” I said.
I was surprised when Sonny said okay, he’d come over, couldn’t sleep anyhow. Sonny Lippert had been my boss on and off for a long time, right back to the day when he picked me out at the academy because I could speak languages, or at least that’s what he always says.
These days I humor him because of the past. He still drives me crazy some of the time, but we’re close now. He helped me with some really bad stuff last summer. When Rhonda, his wife, is away he sits up alone until dawn reading Dostoyevsky and Dickens, listening to Coltrane, drinking the whiskey the doctor says will kill him.
Shivering, I went back to my bedroom, yanked on some jeans and a sweatshirt, shoved my feet into a pair of ratty sneakers, grabbed a jacket and my keys, and headed downstairs, where it was snowing lightly, like confetti drifting onto the deserted sidewalk.
Who was dead? Some Russian? All I wanted was to go back to sleep.
***
“Morning,” a voice said, as I walked out onto the street, and I looked up and saw Sam, the doorman from the building next to mine. It was also an old loft building, that dated back to the 1870s. But the owners had transformed it into a fancy condo—marble floors, doorman.
A black guy in a good suit, Sam was a presence on the street now. He was a quiet man. Didn’t say much, though once in a while we compared the stats of our favorite ballplayers. I said hi and went across the street to Mike’s coffee shop.
When I tapped on the coffee-shop window, Mike looked up from behind the counter. He grinned, unlocked the front door, waved me to a stool. There was fresh coffee brewing. Some pie was in the oven. It smelled good that time of morning. From the ceiling hung a string of green Christmas lights.
Mike Rizzi pretty much runs the block: he takes packages, watches kids, serves free pie and coffee to local cops on patrol.
In New York, everybody has a coffee shop, a bar, a restaurant where they hang out. It’s the way our tribes set themselves up, claim their piece of territory. To eat, I go over to Beatrice at Il Posto on East Second Street; to drink to my friend Tolya’s club in the West Village, or maybe Fanelli’s on Prince.
“What’s the pie?” I said.
“Apple,” said Mike. “You’re up early, man.”
“Can I have a piece?”
He was pleased. Mike’s obsessed with his pies.
“
Deck the halls with boughs of holly
,” came a voice over the sound system Mike rigged up years ago.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Excuse me? That,” he said, “that is Nana Mouskouri, the great Greek singer.” Mike, who’s Italian, is crazy about the Greeks. Over the ziggurat of miniature boxes of Special K, on a shelf against the back wall, he keeps signed pictures of Telly Savalas, Jackie Onassis— he counts her as an honorary Greek—and Jennifer Aniston. “You know her real name is Anastasakis,” Mike says to me about once a week.
“ ’Tis the season to be jolly . . .”
“What are you doing around at this hour?” Mike looked at me intently. “You just got home from some hot date? You found a nice woman yet, Artie?”
“Sonny Lippert. Needs me for something.”
“Jesus, man, I thought Lippert retired.”
I ate some pie. “That’s really good, Mike.”
“Thanks. So, you ever see her?”
“Who?”
“Lily Hanes. You could bring her over to me and Ange for supper. Ange always says, ‘When’s Artie going to marry Lily?’”
“Sure.”
“What, you met her, like, ten, fifteen years ago? I know you’ve dated plenty of women, and we liked Maxine and all when you got married to her, but you weren’t the same with her like with Lily.” Mike was in a talkative mood.
For ten minutes while Mike pulled pies out of the oven and set them on the counter to cool, while I drank his coffee, we exchanged neighborhood gossip. I agreed to go over to his house in Brooklyn— he drives in every morning, around two a.m.—for dinner. But all the time we were making small talk, I could see there was something on his mind.
“What’s eating you?”
“Nothing, man.”
“You pissed off because McCain didn’t get in?”
Mike’s a vet, served in the first Gulf War, volunteers at the VA hospital. McCain’s a god to him.
“I got over it, more or less. It was that broad’s fault, Palin. Geez. Who invited her to the party?” Mike, looked over my head toward the door. “You got company,” he said.
For Alice, my best friend and sister
Copyright © 2009 by Reggie Nadelson
Excerpt from
Blood Count
copyright © 2010 by Reggie Nadelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8027-1752-8 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-8027-1752-7 (hardcover)
First published in Great Britain in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Ltd.
First published in the United States by Walker & Company in 2009
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-0-8027-7791-1
Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at
www.walkerbooks.com