Londongrad (7 page)
I pulled up near the club, and got out with Janna and walked her back to Dacha where there was a long line at the velvet rope, the guy dressed as a Cossack standing at it.
“Thanks,” I said, and watched her go into the club, then come out again.
“Listen,” she said. “There’s this young guy, a cop, he’s here tonight, he comes a lot. He knew Masha, he could maybe help you.”
Dressed up, black linen shirt, cuffs turned back, white jeans, expensive loafers, hair freshly cut, a gold watch, bright against his tanned arm, Bobo Leven was greeting people everywhere in the club. He shook hands. He thumped them on the back, he gave guys hugs, he kissed girls. Then he saw me.
I cornered him, made him go into the bar.
“I thought you were working the case,” I said.
“I am working it, Artie, it’s okay, I know what I’m doing.” He greeted the bartender who brought him a Coke.
“So you’re a regular here, you must have known the dead girl.”
“I saw her a few times.”
“You already knew her name?”
“I wasn’t sure if it was Masha, not at first,” he said.
“You didn’t tell me?”
“You said you didn’t want to be bothered with this, so I didn’t bother you. You said you were on vacation.”
“That’s bullshit, Bobo.”
“You want to hear what I have?”
“Sure.”
“Masha had a husband named Zim Panchuk. From Lvov. Ukraine.”
“I know where it is.”
“They maybe met in London where they were both working, him as a truck driver, her as a maid. He took her to Alaska. He was legal. He had a job on the pipeline. Soon as they got there, and she was in America, she dumped him and probably came to New York right away.”
“Yeah, and the husband?”
“I called. He left his job two days ago. He went back to Russia.”
“You got a lot of stuff pretty fast.”
“I called around.”
“You didn’t think to call me?”
“I’m sorry, Artie. If you want I’ll keep you in the loop, I just thought you didn’t want in. But from now on, you’ll be my first call, man.”
“Yeah, well, I have to get back to the city. One more thing, Bobo.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“Where were you last night?”
A girl I knew slightly was coming out of the building with her dog, a dachshund, and we exchanged views on the noise in the street the night before and cracked some jokes about the tourists. She was going up on the roof one night and shoot at them with a beebee gun, she said, and I laughed. We agreed to get coffee some day and I felt better. Coming home here to my place off Broadway where I’d lived for fifteen years made everything okay. I was home.
Upstairs in my loft, I switched on the news and got scores from the game last night—the Yankees were so lousy this summer only a faithful dog of a fan like me would care. I was thinking of switching to the Dodgers. At least they had Joe Torre.
Already there was a report on the girl on the swing. Speculation had begun on Masha Panchuk. It was a holiday weekend and the news cycle was hungry and everybody had an opinion: it was drug-related; the work of some nutjob seeking attention; a crazed terrorist. There was even an item about a Brooklyn artist who made human forms out of duct tape he had purchased after 9/11 when the city bought the stuff in bulk so we could all tape up our windows against some future nuke attack. I turned the TV off.
With Clifford Brown on my stereo, and listening to the incredible “Joy Spring” solo, I got into the shower, let it pour hot and hard over me, then switched to ice cold. When I got out I looked in the mirror.
I was looking okay. I’d been sleeping, I had quit smoking for the most part, I lost a few pounds.
Clean clothes on, I fixed some espresso. My place was looking good. I’d bought it cheap years earlier when nobody wanted a place down here, and I had scraped down the old wood floors myself until they shone. Got some nice mid-50s furniture. Put up shelves.
On the walls were framed photographs of the musicians I love—Stan Getz, Ella, Duke, Lester Young, Dizzy, Miles. Maybe I’d retire and take lessons. My father had loved the music. Even in Moscow, he had loved it.
I checked my messages. Tolya had called twice, reminding me I was due at his club to sample new wines. Another friend wanted to know if I’d go fishing the following day. It was okay. Everything was fine. I was okay.
On that night when I drove over to Tolya’s place, Manhattan felt like a cruise ship, an overcrowded pleasure boat, getting ready to sink, but full of people having a ball as it sailed through the lit-up streets. Any minute, though, it would hit bedrock and start to go down, too loaded up with ambition, real estate, money, talent, sex, drugs booze, work, and always money. It was ready. It was ripe. Something had to explode.
In the summer, New York lived in the streets. Restaurants and bars spilled their customers out onto the streets, along the big avenues, on the grid of streets running river to river, and in the winding alleys downtown.
The streets were jammed with tourists gorging on the city, the dollar cheap. Everywhere you heard foreign voices, Japanese, French, Brit, all of them frenzied, rushing the bars, restaurants, even stores that were open late to service them, to sell them stuff, any stuff, sneakers, computers, sheets, like they were expecting disaster, their last best chance, as if they, too, somehow knew a crash was coming. The streets seemed to shudder from so many pounding feet, I felt I could feel them move, judder, throb, under my own feet.
Every transaction took place over food, booze, coffee, drugs as people hurried, hurry, hurry, to get some whatever it was while the stock market went up four hundred points, then down four hundred points. Oil skyrocketed, money was made out of smoke and mirrors and fraud, and there were more homeless out on the streets than I had seen for years.
Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.
A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.
In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.
I only half listened. I didn’t have any money anyway.
The West Village had changed since I first got to New York when, for a while, I lived in a crummy walk-up on Horatio Street and hung around the Village Vanguard to hear the music. Bums pissed on my front steps, but writers still went to the White Horse Tavern, and gay men haunted the Hudson piers where you could take some sun and smell the stink of pollution in the river.
All gone.
Brownstones on tree-lined streets housed movie stars, limos idled at the curb outside pubs where painters used to go back in the day, and nobody, not the writers or artists or jazz guys, gave a rat’s ass for money. Manhattan’s Old Bohemia had disappeared.
My head felt thick. I couldn’t stop thinking about Masha, the duct tape, the way she died. I parked in front of Pravda2, and went in, and then I knew what had been bothering me, making my head thick, making me edgy, unnerved by the noise and the night.
A wall of sheer noise rose up at me when I went through the door of Pravda2. The rosy light made the faces beautiful. Among them I looked for Val, but she wasn’t there.
“You’ll ask him, you promise, you won’t let him go to London, right?” I remembered her words. I didn’t understand her obsession, her urgency, the fear I had seen in her face. I’d tell Tolya, but later.
Over the sound system came Sinatra on an album he recorded in Paris, maybe his best. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, sang Frank.
I made my way to the bar. At the far end, Tolya was talking intently to a chubby guy in black, the two of them sipping red wine.
For a while I sat and drank a Scotch and watched the crowd, looking for Valentina. I asked the bartender if he’d seen her.
“She was in earlier.”
“Is she coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
Waiters slipped through the spaces between tables with finesse, the usual ballet, hefting plates, depositing platters of oysters and langoustines. I got a steak sandwich, very rare, on fresh French bread.
For Tolya food was not just fuel or even simply a nice thing. I once had to track him to the Bronx where he was examining some baby lamb at the uptown meat market. Food was central to life, he said, you could not exist without it, and what he wanted, he had to have.
Fresh mozzarella had to come from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street the same day he ate it. A tongue sandwich on rye bread, he wanted sliced very thin, and the bread had to be rye, so fresh it was almost moist, with those little seeds and the mustard German and brown. He once described this to me for about ten minutes and then he said he had to get to the Carnegie deli because talking about the tongue made him hungry for it.
Sinatra sang “Night And Day”.
I waited until the club began to empty out, until there was only a couple at a little table, touching each other’s faces, and a small group of men still talking wine with Tolya.
There were times now I got the feeling he was playing a part, that he spent more than he had on his clubs, that he flew to London and Moscow all the time for show, that he was surrounded by people who clamored for his attention, but why, why these people, rich, but pompous, a lot of them, people who dropped brands and names? These days, Tolya fell for the kind of flattery that he would have laughed at once. Among them were Russian names, and I’d say, oh, come on, Tol, these people are creeps, these oligarchs you love so much, your Olegs and Romans.
“Don’t be an ass, Artemy,” was all he ever said.
At four the last customer left, Tolya came out from behind the bar, and rubbed his face.
“I’m just going to lock up,” Tolya called up. “Then we can drink serious wine.”
“How come you tend bar yourself?”
“This is for fun,” said Tolya, locked the front door, came back, took a cigar out of a box on the bar, put it in his mouth and lit it, puffed at it for a few seconds.
“Everything’s okay?”
“Sure.”
“You’re going to London?”
“You decided to come. Fantastic.”
“Why don’t you stay in New York instead? The weather’s better,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Valentina told you to say this?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “You’re not exactly subtle, Artyom.”
“Is she coming tonight?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” He stared at me. “There’s something going on with you and her?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said, and finished my drink.
“You talk to her behind my back?”
“Fuck off.”
“Let’s go upstairs and have a drink,” he said, and held up a bottle of red.
“Not that stuff,” I said, gesturing at the single malt he always poured for me. “Just regular Scotch, okay?”
The wine in one hand, he picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, his idea of regular Scotch, led me to the back room, then up four flights of narrow stairs and out onto the roof. He was pretty nimble for a big guy.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to a pair of overstuffed armchairs arranged on a worn red and blue Persian rug.
On a table between the chairs was a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket. Tolya put the Scotch and the red wine next to it. There was a short-wave radio. A small CD player with speakers.
We sat, he poured, he puffed his cigar, we admired the city lights. The late-night buzz was fainter now, the city turning quiet. I didn’t mention the girl on the swing. I didn’t want Tolya involved. He got involved, he brought in his guys, as he called them. They poked around, they screwed up my case. It had happened before. I didn’t need Russian muscle on this thing. It wasn’t even my case.
“So you like my nice roof here?” he said, and told me he’d finally bought the whole brownstone.
“I thought no more real estate,” I said, drinking the Scotch, which was delicious.
“Artyom, is teeny tiny little building, not real estate,” said Tolya in his fake Russki accent. “Times are not so good, Wall Street goes down the toilet, economy is shit, so I like to buy real estate for my kids, you know? I buy them little bit in New York, what can ever happen with real estate, right? Also, they like America. They are Americans,” he said. He chuckled, a big man’s laugh. “America, all is money, all is shopping malls and consuming,” he said, and when I mentioned his eighteen pairs of bespoke Gucci loafers, some in rare skins, all with eighteen-carat gold buckles, he only shrugged. “Shoes are Italian,” he said, and broke up laughing.
Tolya Sverdloff didn’t like America much. He didn’t like the politics, he didn’t like what he figured was the land of George W. Bush. He kept a place in the city, he did business here, bought and sold real estate—the huge penthouse near Sutton Place, the SoHo loft, another one in the Meat Market district. He claimed most of it was for the kids, for Val who loved the city and considered herself an American, and her sister at med school in Boston.
In the Soviet Union, Sverdloff’s parents had been stars among the Communist Party faithful, and well rewarded for it, his mother a movie star, his father a director. He grew up with access most kids like me had never dreamed of, and I didn’t have it bad as most.
The parents idolized certain American writers like Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, actors like John Garfield in his day, and Bogart and Brando and musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, but they had the Russian intellectuals’ prejudice against American culture.
