Bloody London (12 page)

“I have to go uptown.”

“So we'll go eat with my cousin up on 86th Street, OK? Cheer you up. You OK? We'll fix your place like new. I got a couple good guys coming in to help with the floor. I swear to you, we'll do it like before.”

“Thanks, Rick. Thank you, man. I'm OK.”

“Pay your rent, asshole!” On the sidewalk near Gracie Mansion, a woman with a heavy cross around her neck hectored some demonstrators. The sun glinted off the cross.

We ate a late breakfast at Rick's cousin's, then
walked a few blocks up. The demonstrators were a ragged bunch. A few had cheap Halloween masks on; a black guy wore a rubber parody of the mayor, the rictus grin, the flat head, the hair that looked like it fell off a tree.

The week before, the mayor had announced he intended killing all rent control for good. It would squeeze the poor who squeezed the unemployed. The homeless got hit worst. The homeless were like pus that oozed into the streets, someone said. “We're the pus in the pimple on the ass of the good times,” one street-corner wise-ass cracked. He got a gig as a writer on a sitcom that featured three homeless guys.

“Pay your rent,” the woman with the cross shouted again, and this time the man in the rubber Giuliani mask looked at her and said, “We ain't got no apartments to pay rent on, lady.”

“Look to God,” she screamed. “God will provide.”

“He'll have to,” Rick said to me. He looked over at Gracie Mansion. “I'm not betting on the mayor's having them all in for breakfast.”

“Jesus, in the eighties the homeless was a scandal, now it's like they're street furniture.” I turned my head and saw a cop I knew slightly. I looked at his badge. Santini. He was in uniform and he took off his cap and mopped his head and watched the demonstration.

The fallout from the Pascoe case, the fury over rent control, the stock market, landlords dying to evict, tenants terrified, prices on apartments heading north, not just fancy buildings, but everyplace, even the boroughs, made people scared. Five, six, ten grand to
rent out a loft on the Bowery, or even down under the Brooklyn Bridge Overpass, what they're calling DUMBO.

“Like food in a famine, Art,” Rick said. “Everyone's fighting each other for turf. Remember Pop used to tell us about the gang wars in the old Chinatown days? People would stick a knife in your heart to get the best stall in the market. Literally. Only now it's a piece of real estate.”

Santini, who'd been listening a while, laughed bitterly. “Yeah, triumph of unfettered capitalism, right? Greedy pricks, all of them. I had the pleasure recently of helping out when one management company uptown was hauled in for extortion on contracts for some of the fanciest buildings in Manhattan. We even got a couple of big deal realtors implicated.” He grinned. “I know all about housing scams. I grew up on Carmine Street. My great-granddad was the founder of the Italian Workingman's Coalition. I learned the rhetoric in the neighborhood. Carmine Street. Can't afford it now. So, Art, you still live in that great loft?”

I said. “Yeah, I got in early. I was lucky. Hey look, man, when you made those arrests, the management companies, the realtors? You didn't come across a guy name of Salvatore Castle?”

“Yeah, sure. I wished I could have hung something on him, but nothing stuck.”

Rick went back to his cousin's, Santini went off duty and I followed the ragtag demonstration. It broke up, people drifted off, aimless. The black guy with the mayor's mask, he must have been past sixty, stopped in
a bank lobby on First Avenue. It was empty except for one woman getting cash at the machine. She saw him, finished her business, scurried out of the door.

Through the glass, I saw the homeless guy sit wearily on the window ledge. He pushed the rubber mask off his face and on to his head, then he took off his shoes. He rubbed his feet like any bastard whose feet hurt him, minding his business. Someone had dealt him a lousy hand somewhere in his lousy life and I was sorry for him. When it comes to a guy with no place to live whose feet are killing him, I feel bad. Maybe some of the old Sov prop I learned at school – equality, property – kicks in.

I watched. I watched while a couple of goons, spotting him, went over and began pushing him, one hitting his arm, the other socking him on the shoulder. The black guy cringed. A goon slapped his face. They took turns now, then they shoved him across the lobby and out of the door.

I went over and gave him five bucks, and he looked back at the bank and said, “It's what the city calls social outreach.” Then he put his mask back on and added, “Trick or Treat.”

Sal Castle, the realtor with the Zegna suits, had been calling me every four hours like bad medicine. Wanted to help, he said. Updates, he said. But he never told me anything and he was nervous.

All along I had the feeling Castle knew who Ulanova's “nephew” was. A Russian nephew who was going to inherit a share of the Middlemarch. I couldn't figure out how to get at Castle until the cop on the
street – Santini – near Gracie Mansion gave me an idea. I found Castle in his office, writing letters in old-fashioned copperplate with a fountain pen. On the wall were framed ads; celebrity realtors.

I said to Castle, “You've had a few problems – not you but your management company. A few people cut deals they shouldn't have. Put their hands in the maintenance money, cut funny deals with certain plumbers. Is that right, Sal?”

He looked up. He was a man who got a message. “How can I help you?”

“Mrs Ulanova's nephew.”

“Who?”

“Come on, Sal. There was a nephew. I heard there was a nephew who would inherit. Russian, maybe.”

He looked at the window. Castle, jittery now, got up. “Yes, all right. I met him. But that kind of thing's privileged. If it gets around, I'm dead.”

“What's his name?”

“I don't know.”

“Come on.”

“He was a big guy. Very very big. Six six.”

“Russian?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“What else?”

“Dimples.”

“What?”

“He had dimples. I'm sorry, but it was unusual. And an emerald stud in one ear.” Castle seemed to cower. He gripped the edge of his desk with his manicured nails. “It's all I know, I swear to God.”

Before he was finished I was half-way out the door.

“I'm sorry. That's all I know, honestly,” he was saying, but I was in the street.

I should have returned the message, but I was drowning in stuff – the murder itself, Lily's leaving, Frankie's needs, the cretins who fucked up my loft. I took out my phone, dialled.

Come on! I said half out loud. Answer the phone!

“Comrade, darling!” The voice boomed in my ear in the kind of purring, cultivated Russian that twitched my soul and scared me with its seductions. I always figured I had climbed permanently out from my past; I was never really sure.

“Sweetheart, Artyom, you didn't return my message, where the fuck are you?”

I told him and added, “Where the fuck are you?”

“I'm looking at you, sweetheart,” said Tolya Sverdloff. He gave me an address on Sutton Place. “Come up.”

“Come down,” I said.

“I'll meet you,” he said.

Around us in Mr Chow's were fat-ass Russian men with heavy gold rings, American bankers and the Natashas. The Slavic babes were exquisite, all six feet tall, all cheekbones and lips, some with fur on in spite of the weather, and Harry Winston diamonds the size of cherries. Like Lulu Fine said, these girls were Ultra-Natashas. I'd seen them around town, at Au Bar and Pravda, or shopping the Upper East Side where they were quick with the platinum cards their boyfriends gave them. Most were in their early twenties, and I watched them, covered in Chanel or Voyage, chattering and smelling of sex, Hermès bags on the table next to the Cristal Rosé. The crocodile bags cost thirty grand and there were waiting lists.

I helped out on a case once when a Natasha named Marina turned up cold as her own heart in a very fancy hotel. Also, I read Lily's fashion magazines in the can. Like great houses, fashion's my kind of porn. I thought about Lily on her way to London, shoved it out of my mind. She had a right. Fuck London, I
thought. But I missed her.

By way of greeting, Tolya kissed me on the cheeks three times, then straightened his black mohair jacket as a maître d' seated us at a table. I ordered a Coke. Tolya ordered brandy to drink, then fried seaweed, Peking duck, lemon chicken and red wine.

“For lunch?”

He said in Russian, “I'm hungry.”

He lit a cigarette and in the flame from his half-pound gold Dunhill, Anatoly Sverdloff's face was as big as an Easter Island statue but with dimples you could put a baby's fist in. He was six six, maybe three hundred pounds, hands that always looked big and juicy as veal chops. I'd met Tolya, what, three, four years ago, when he saved my ass on Brighton Beach, then again in Hong Kong. He drops in when he's in town, usually loaded with gifts for Beth, who adores him. Last I'd heard he had sold most of Macau and was purchasing beachfront property in Cuba for cash.

Now he held a piece of fabric between thumb and forefinger, showing me the material of his jacket. “Versace,” he said. “Custom. Thank God I got a couple dozen outfits made before – you know? Terrible tragedy.” He was talking about Versace's death.

I spoke English. “You're the nephew, so called, aren't you? The heir to the apartment. I should have known when I got your message on my machine Monday.”

“You should have answered.”

“I was busy.”

He folded some duck and cucumber into a pancake,
dipped it delicately in plum sauce and ate it. “Me, too.”

“But you don't have a dead Russian auntie, Tolya, do you? Somehow you got hold of Ulanova and you talked her into leaving you the place. What's the game?”

He said, “Very good, Artyom. I saw the ad, when? A few days ago, a week? Two? I'm a real-estate guy, I liked the sound. I discovered poor Princess Ulanova needed help. The asshole who runs the board threatened her. Told her no one she sold to would ever get board approval. We did a deal.”

“You gave her the money, told her she could stay as long as she lived, she made you her heir, you don't need board approval.”

Tolya nodded. “I said to her, you live here the rest of your life, is OK. We made papers. Next day, before she removes ad, Pascoe's dead. She's sick.”

I'd thought about it before, that maybe the ad killed Pascoe. Maybe he saw the ad, got enraged, invited Ulanova to swim, set her up to get whacked and got it himself in the neck instead. It wasn't a scenario that played right with me, though.

I said to Tolya. “So you took it off the market.”

“Sure, it was mine.”

“You didn't kill Pascoe, by the way, did you?”

“Artyom!”

“Why'd you want that dump of hers?”

He ate a piece of chicken. “It's a special building.” Tolya wiped his mouth, tossed a bundle of money on the tablecloth and said, “Come, I have a surprise.”

It was the building next to Lulu Fine's, the half-finished
limestone tower Sal Castle pitched me. A pair of hardhats, their legs slung over the scaffold, ate out of a bucket of chicken.

“What happened to your place on the park?”

“Too small.” Tolya savored the moment. “And I like to buy. I go to see the Donald, you know who I mean, a few others. He is one weird guy. He hates shaking your hand. He likes you to bow instead. I bow, he sells.”

The building was unoccupied except for Tolya and a couple of others, he said. But uniformed flunkies manned the doors and operated the elevators. The place smelled of wet cement and plaster dust. Everywhere the painters' dropcloths fluttered on your feet, in your face, like ghosts.

On the top floor, the elevator opened into the penthouse. “Real Estate, Artyom. It's the only thing that's any good, you know? Here, Moscow, London, Havana.”

“I thought the Hong Kong market collapsed.”

Tolya found a bottle of brandy he'd left out on top of a packing crate, poured some and handed me a glass. “I bought Hong Kong, I sold Hong Kong. A few overpriced apartments in Hong Kong, the stock market cracks up, remember October 97? You have to play with it. Remember my father? He bored us to death talking about the land. I thought all you needed was love and a bass guitar, but he was right. This,” he said, sweeping his huge arms out to embrace the apartment, and maybe the entire city, “this is my piece of land.”

He pushed a button and the room lit up. It was a
large room with curved floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. The river, the city, the skyline, the buildings all seemed present inside the room. It was a virtual city, a hyper-real New York floating on bright blue sky.

We went out on the wraparound terrace, where there was a high-power telescope. I peered in it: you could see the whole city. To one side was the building with the staircase to nowhere; in front was the Middlemarch, the townhouses, riverfront, the river, burned silver by the sun.

Tolya followed my glance. He looked down at the Middlemarch and said, “Ah, yes, the old asleep in the shadow of the future.”

“You're a poet, man.”

He grinned. “Thank you.”

We went back inside and Tolya showed me his newest toy. “Custom-made Monopoly set,” he said. “Look.”

I looked. The set sat on a couple of packing crates in the middle of the empty room. The board was polished slivers of dark and pale wood. The pieces were gold and silver, the houses and hotels tiny but exact models. Tolya scooped up some Monopoly money in his hand and I saw it consisted of gold Krugerrands.

“My property.” Tolya picked up a house and popped open the roof. “Everything to scale. Look, furniture, people, everything. Eighteen karat. I buy something, I have a building made for Monopoly set.”